To Transcend the Hunt
by Ghingahn
Summary: Instead of a flying castle with fantasy and swordplay, Kayaba Akihiko's masterpiece is a hyper-realistic Lovecraftian nightmare.
1. Welcome to Yharnam

AN: Read a Youtube comment, got inspired. In which the real reason Kayaba trapped players in his game is because _no one would play it otherwise._ Poor Asuna.

Disclaimer: Bloodborne belongs to its creators, SAO belongs to its creators, I'm not making any money off this, etc. Also, I've never actually played Bloodborne, so feel free to let me know if I get something gratuitously wrong.

* * *

When Asuna opens her eyes, she's not in her bedroom anymore. She's lying on what seems like a gurney in a dim room draped in the stench of old blood. She tries to move, but her limbs feel heavy and sluggish, so she only watches and listens as the strange old man leans over her and speaks.

There's a... brief tug at her mind. Later, much later, she will realize this is the first sign that things are not as they should be. He says, "Good. All signed and sealed," and laughs, the sound desperate and empty of any vestige of humor. Then he's gone. A beast rises from a pool of blood, skin dripping and eyes wild, and screams as it burns. Horrors climb over her, little white monsters with gaping mouths and eyes sockets, skin stretched too tightly over their bones. A woman speaks, but, as in a dream, the words flicker out of her memory before she can grasp them.

And then she can move. Her limbs jerk, sending her tumbling over the side of the gurney. It hurts when she hits the floor. She sits up on her knees, breaths coming quickly, and hurriedly opens the menu. Her fingers are shaking as they flick through the options, searching for the Quit Game button. There is rust under her nails from the gurney. She can hear muffled sounds from somewhere behind the door with light shining through its windows. She heard her brother talking about the game trailers and the beta testers' experiences, so she had an idea of what to expect, but this is... too much.

It takes several minutes before she accepts that it's too well hidden for her to find. A crash of wood startles her, and the scuffling she'd heard behind the door is suddenly too close. Asuna swipes away the options and checks her inventory. She has the clothes she's already wearing and nothing else. Aren't video games supposed to give players weapons? Armor? Anything?

And then the beast stalks through the doorway. Asuna screams as it leaps, scrambling back in time for it to land in front of her, close enough for the blood clinging to its fur to speckle her face. It turns. Its fevered breaths burn on her skin. The wet noises from its throat don't belong to any animal, and its appearance doesn't fit anything she knows. She wonders, with a mind made bright and wild with terror, what it's supposed to be based on.

Then the dark liquid on its claws gleams—

There is bone glaring up at her. Her own bone. It _hurts_ , it hurts—

It doesn't. Her eyes are closed. She opens them to moonlight.

There's no blood. She smells something she can't name, familiar and alien at once, but it isn't blood, and for the moment that's all that matters. She doesn't know how long she spends there. When she finally rubs the tears and snot away and picks herself up, the light hasn't changed and the moon still hangs low in the sky.

She still can't find the Quit Game button.

She's in a graveyard. She must have died, earlier. She wonders if one if the graves is her own, but when she reads the inscription on the first one, she doesn't find a name.

 _1st Floor Sickroom_.

She thinks of claws and foul heat on her skin.

The little white monsters live in the graveyard, clusters of them rising from the paths. They gurgle and beckon when she walks near. They still look terrifying, to the point she can't bring herself to touch them, but passing by them is the only way to make it up the stairs to the house on the hill. She tries to go past them, but they block her way. They're holding weapons, three blades and two guns, that they offer up to her.

The thin, delicate cane makes her remember the beast towering over her. With the saw, she imagines the teeth catching in the beast's scraggly fur. She takes the axe.

The guns give her pause. She's never seen a firearm before, knows nothing about them aside from their deadliness. She settles on the longer one, which the description in the inventory informs her is a blunderbuss.

Then they give her a notebook with a pen attached. It doesn't look like a weapon.

It isn't.

 _How do I quit the game?_ she writes. She tears off the sheet and pases it to the cluster that gave her the notebook. The creatures sink into the ground.

She sits on the steps and searches the menu again as she waits for an answer. She finds something in her inventory that she didn't put there: a Hunter's Mark. She doesn't know what the description means, its references to blood echoes, but it seems like it's meant to be helpful, and... when she thinks about it, this might be the way to quit. _...awakes afresh, as if it were all just a bad dream._ If anything can qualify as a bad dream, this stupidly edgy game is it. She focuses on the design, feeling a little silly. When nothing happens, she closes her eyes and tries again.

She hears claws on wood.

The beast paces upstairs, its steps steady. It doesn't know she's there. There's a small lantern behind Asuna with a group of the white creatures staring up at her from its base, and she's hardly thinking before she's grabbing for the light. The sickroom fades away to moonlight.

Her heart is beating too fast. She draws the massive axe at her waist and examines the edge of the blade. She can't imagine fur and flesh standing up to it. Hesitantly, she swings it—it should be far too heavy for her, but she holds it easily even with one hand. Feeling a little more confident, she swings again. The gun doesn't have bullets, so it's useless to her, but she experiments with aiming and pulling the trigger.

She explores the rest of the graveyard, reading the notes from other players that the little creatures offer to her. They worry her.

The house on the hill is unlocked. Gehrman explains things, after a fashion.

"Are you... a real person?" Asuna asks.

"No less real than this dream," the old man in the wheelchair answers. "As to how real that may be... well, you'll see, one way or another."

"How do I wake up?"

"This hunter's dream exists as a home to hunters," says Gehrman. "It will end when it loses its purpose. You will find a way, I expect. You hunters... generally do."

No option to end the game. No way to wake up from the dream. The other players' messages. There's an inkling growing in her mind, but she shreds it before she can think it. She remembers too clearly the glimpse of her own bone.

She bows slightly. "I'm Asuna. Please take care of me."

"Hunter... Asuna," Gehrman says quietly. "In this workshop, hunters used blood to enhance their weapons and flesh. We don't have as many tools as we once did, but... you're welcome to use whatever you find. The messengers will aid you, and I will advise as you require." Dropping his voice even further: "...Even the doll is at your disposal, should it please you."

"The one by the fountain?"

Gehrman only nods.

The doll hasn't moved. She leaves it to head for the gravestone with the inscription. She looks at it for a while, tracing the lines of the letters.

The notes around the graveyard have changed, but not as much as she would have wished. In the garden behind the workshop, she sits amidst silver flowers. The moon looms in the sky. She wonders how long it's been since she put on the headset. Will her mom unplug the console if Asuna doesn't go back soon? She has to.

She doesn't.

Asuna returns to the grave. She lays her hand over the words.

Claws on wood. She takes a breath to steady herself, hands reaching for the axe. It's only a beast. It has teeth and claws, but she has a weapon this time, and... she doesn't want to hurt again. She won't let it hurt her again.

She moves silently up the stairs and edges around the doorway. The beast has its head turned away from her. She slides in quietly, pulse quickening, fingers whitening around the axe's handle. The beast's ears twitch, a snarl bubbles from its throat, and she swings before she can hesitate. She catches it as it's turning, the weapon sinks into its shoulder—

She hesitates. Just for an instant. She wasn't expecting it to feel so real. She's hurting something alive, something made of flesh and blood as she is, and its wounded, guttural screech only makes her feel it more keenly. She knows this is a video game and that this monster is only a monster, but just for an instant she believes otherwise, and that instant is enough for her grip to slacken. When the beast springs away from her, it tears the axe from her hands.

It charges her, and she acts purely on fear, throwing herself out of its path, but not fast enough. It turns, too quickly, and swipes at her before putting distance between them again. Asuna staggers with a choked scream, warm blood crawling down her back.

It's coming at her again. It's going to hurt her again. She still has her gun, her blunderbuss— _useless without bullets_ , she thinks, but she grabs it off her hip and smashes it into the beast's head with all her strength before it can touch her. The beast staggers, dazed, and she takes the chance to hit it again, and again, and again, and again, and even when it's fallen to the ground it's still twitching so she keeps going—

It isn't moving. The blunderbuss slips from her hands. Blood splashes onto her shoes when it hits the floor. She falls to her knees, pressing a wet hand to her shoulder blade as tears blur her vision.

She doesn't know why, but her flesh begins to knit back together. The pain fades quickly. When she can take a breath without sniffling, she wipes the tears away on her sleeve, replacing water with blood, picks up her blunderbuss, and tugs her axe out of the beast's corpse.

The stench is overwhelming. She can't stay here any longer, so she heads down to the lantern room. The room after it is larger, filled with gurneys, with what might have been a person once spread out across the floor. It's impossible to walk through the room without stepping in puddles, so she doesn't try. Her outfit, she notes, is not very good at keeping liquid from soaking through.

Another set of stairs later, she's allowed her first sight of Yharnam.

Fittingly, it's a graveyard.


	2. Central Yharnam

Asuna tries to talk to the first person she meets. He looks... a little suspicious, wandering aimlessly through the street late in the evening with an axe dragging in one hand and a torch in the other, but it makes sense to be armed if the beast that killed her isn't the only one in the town. She calls out to him, and— he attacks her. Calls her a beast. He hears her, hears her words, but they're just sounds to him.

 _Okay_ , she thinks, trying to shake off the feeling of fire catching on her arm and an axe shearing through her neck, _maybe it's the blood_. She was completely drenched in the stuff, it makes sense that he'd... attack her on sight. Ignore her words. She looked like a mass murderer. It makes sense.

It doesn't.

When she finds the next man, she doesn't wait for him to see her. She tugs her axe out of his back in time to meet his friend's charge. He's a sloppy fighter, just as sloppy as her, but he has reach and strength and a flame that burns. She has her own advantages, though. Unlike him, she doesn't die when she's killed, and she doesn't forget him as soon as he kills her. He attacks the same way each time, exactly the same. It takes her too long to learn his attack pattern, but she does in the end.

She comes across another lamp. It lights up when she touches it. She goes back to the dream, to the strange scent she's already come to associate with safety. She doesn't know how long she spends in the garden.

In Yharnam, she finds a horde of the armed madmen gathered around a dead beast burning on a stake. She dies a few times, but she takes down at least one of them with each death. Progress is slow, but she whittles them down until there are only corpses on the cobblestones.

She learns some things from that encounter. Her axe can extend its handle, letting her switch ranges even mid-swing. Blood—other people's blood—heals her wounds. The little white creatures Gehrman called messengers give her half a dozen empty glass vials. While she's filling them, she finds useful things on the corpses, more vials and silver bullets. The description of the bullets tells her they need her blood to be most effective, so she opens a long slit across her wrist and drenches them in red. It kills her, of course, but it's a nearly painless death.

Not just the men, but the animals have gone mad as well. The crows, too bloated for their wings to bear them aloft, nonetheless throw themselves at her. She finds monsters in cages—she thinks, at first, that they're like the beast that killed her, but she watches them raging at their bars and realizes they were dogs once. Rats the size of hounds lurk in the sewers, disease speckling their bodies and terror glinting in their eyes. She isn't prepared for the poison they carry on their claws, or how quickly it acts. Before she dies, she visualizes the Hunter's Mark in her mind, the lines clear and sharp, and immediately she finds herself at the lamp, the poison purged from her veins.

She goes up to the workshop. She listens to Gehrman. He suggests she look into the Healing Church, the source of Yharnam's knowledge of blood healing. They cast themselves off from the city when the beasts began to emerge. She'll have to find some way to reach them.

He dozes off. He speaks in his sleep, too low for her to catch the words. "The hunt awaits the hunter," he tells her when he wakes to see her still there, an admonishment and a comfort together.

She runs across a madman in plate armor, wielding a cleaver as long as her axe. It takes her a few tries before she hacks a dent in his chest.

There are houses with the front doors and windows in splinters on the ground. She finds more madmen inside, and beasts. She learns how to get the largest blood sprays from her swings. She learns to walk silently to sneak up on madmen, where to hit to end the fight quickly, where not to get hit and when it's safe to draw back to heal herself with a blood vial. She heals fastest when her wounds are fresh. She learns that every shadow out of her line of sight is a potential threat—her enemies are predictable, but some of them know to set ambushes, and others simply have gotten trapped in strange places.

She finds Molotov cocktails on some of the bodies. The description offers her a short history of the use of flame in beast hunting, and she thinks of the torches the madmen brandish at her.

Her clothes are falling apart. They mend themselves when she returns to the dream, but not enough to recover entirely from the abuse she puts them through. They get a little more worn with each death. She asks Gehrman if the hunters before her left anything in the workshop, and he directs her to the messenger in the fountain, who will sell her what she needs. It trades in blood echoes, he adds pointedly.

She noticed a sort of glow around things just after they died. She shrugged it off before, accepting it as another of Yharnam's oddities, but Gehrman explains that the glow is the transfer of their memories of the beast plague to her. The messengers prize them greatly. She loses them when she dies or when she uses the Hunter's Mark, but she can regain those lost through death by returning to the place where she fell. She isn't the only one who can find them, though; if she dawdles too much before recovering the echoes, something else can come and take them, and she'll have to kill it to get them back.

She learns there are consequences to dying beyond pain and helplessness. It's... annoying. She has to be more cautious. No more suicide attacks, which makes fights last that much longer. It cuts down on travel time between the lamp and the battleground, though. She adapts.

Her blunderbuss does surprisingly little damage, but, fired at exactly the right time, it can make an enemy recoil. It takes a while for her to work out the timing, but the end result is worth it.

She buys new clothes from the fountain messenger. They hold up better than the old ones did and are much more suited to keeping liquid out. They come with a half-mask and a hat with a brim to keep blood off her face.

Little messengers cover the ground around the great bridge like the pale flowers in the dream. They bear notes from other hunters. Some are drawings, sketches of a strange beast with what she hopes aren't ribs protruding from its chest, but most have words.

 _If you fail once, die, die, die again._

 _TURN BACK_

 _You can do it!_

 _make it shut up._

 _gg ez noob git gud_

 _I know which hand it uses, if you know what I mean_

 _Fuck you Kayaba_

 _Beta tester here: that beasts optional._

 _I ATE ITS HEART_

How long has it been since she's eaten anything? She had breakfast this morning, didn't she? It's been night for so long, she has trouble remembering. But it doesn't sound like what's on the bridge is food. She keeps well away.

She kills the monsters in the sewers. The pig gores her in its dying throes, but she uses its blood and the wounds vanish as if they never were.

Another graveyard. This one is different. The beasts and men and monsters Asuna has encountered up until now have, if not worked together, at least not attacked each other, but there's a man here who's cleared out the enemies already. He slams his axe into the corpse at his feet, wrenches it out, slams it down.

Her hope at finding another sane person in this cursed town doesn't last. The man pulls his axe out of the pile of meat and cloth, then turns to her. His eyes are wrapped in bandages. "Beasts all over the shop," he breathes. "You'll be one of them, sooner or later."

He carries an axe and a gun, too, but he outclasses her in every way at using them. There's as much of a gap between the torch-wielding madmen and her as there is between her and this man. She doesn't even mind it when he kills her; it was worth it to watch how he fought.

In the dream, the doll is standing on the path. The doll is the caretaker of the dream and the hunters bound to it, much as Gehrman is the mentor. Asuna can't find it in herself to like her. After so long with only herself and Gehrman and the messengers, the doll's presence is nearly invasive. And... the way the doll looks at her make her feel... unworthy. Unworthy of what, she doesn't know, but it's deeply uncomfortable. She retreats to the workshop once the initial pleasantries have been exchanged.

"Spoken with her, have you?"

"Why did she wake up?" she asks Gehrman.

"You gained the eyes to see her."

The man isn't at the graveyard anymore, but it doesn't take her long to find him again—he's hunting her too. They fight. She dies. She doesn't count. She finds the patterns in his attacks, as predictable in their own way as the other madmen's, and learns how to exploit them.

The man changes.

He says something, but Asuna doesn't hear it because his skin is stretching, growing fur. She spends all of her blood vials killing him, picks up the key that clatters from his belt when he collapses. She feels numb. The beasts are— they were people. Those madmen infesting Yharnam, they're not insane, they're just— halfway to becoming beasts.

There were hints everywhere. Gehrman called the beasts a plague. The madmen have strangely proportioned bodies, while tattered bits of cloth hang from some beasts' emaciated frames. But she never wanted to know. If any person can become a beast, then even Gehrman, trapped in the safety of the dream...

No, Gehrman is stronger than that. As is Asuna. Neither of them is a beast. She leaves a note at the entrance to the graveyard ( _Beast ahead, don't be fooled_ ) and lights the lantern the messengers have brought her.


	3. Tomb of Oedon

AN: This is pre-patch/DLC Bloodborne, so the Insight Bath Messengers won't set up shop until ten Insight. As for the free bell, Kayaba stuck it in the Insight shop with the others. It'll be a few chapters before other players show up in person.

* * *

Oedon Chapel has its own scent, distinct from blood and the dream. The chapel's caretaker tells her it's incense to keep the beast away. He seems lonely. When she asks for a name, he laughs himself off as unimportant, so she only tells him hers. She lets him talk, listens as everything he hasn't had the chance to say finally makes it out. He asks her to send him anyone sane she finds. She doesn't bear much hope of succeeding, but she promises anyway.

As she's making to head onward, someone clears his throat from an alcove.

Asuna's axe is moving before she thinks to startle. The man effortlessly blocks her swing with a shield. "Calm. I'm no enemy."

Asuna doesn't put her axe away. "You're sane?" The incense is too strong for her to make out his scent, so she has to make sure. The beast at the graveyard could speak, and look where that got her.

"As sane as any in Yharnam."

His garb is heavier than any she's ever seen, nearly enough to call armor. She doesn't understand his weapons of choice. He has a sleek gun tucked into his belt, but instead of a melee weapon, his left hand bears a massive shield as tall as his body. What can a shield do? He isn't going to kill any beasts by standing in place and letting them throw themselves against it all night. It doesn't even have spikes or sharp edges.

"Father Gascoigne was baying for you," he says. "I hope he didn't give you trouble."

"Was Gascoigne the graveyard beast?" She's frowning. "He was your father?"

The man laughs. The denizens of Yharnam laugh often, she's noticed. She thinks she's begun to understand why. "It's a title," he says. "My father was... hm. One of the first beasts. It's been a long while since I thought of him."

She catches the implication easily enough: he was here when the plague began. "How do I end the hunt?"

He shakes his head. "It's unfortunate, but I'm afraid I can't answer that." He pauses. "I haven't given you my name. I am Heathcliff."

She dips her head. "Asuna." She hesitates for an instant. "You're a hunter. Why didn't you come if you heard the graveyard beast?"

One corner of his mouth quirks up. "Who would I have helped?"

"You wouldn't help the beast."

"Father Gascoigne was no beast until he fought you," Heathcliff says. Asuna gapes at him. He goes on, "Had you been hunting a beast, then yes, I would readily have sided with you. But that was not what happened, was it? You hunted, and were in turn hunted by, another hunter. It was a personal matter."

"It was—" She stops, gathers herself, begins again. "He was mad from the start—"

"Would you claim sanity yourself? All hunters are mad. Some—like the good father—just more so than the rest."

Asuna bristles. "I'm sane! I'm sane, and that thing wasn't a hunter. How could you even think it was?"

"What do you call a beast, Asuna?" asks Heathcliff.

She's not dealing in philosophy. She tells him so. That puts an end to the conversation. Heathcliff still seems amused as she walks away, in the patronizing way of someone who thinks they know something that no one else does, but Asuna doesn't put much stock in it. He can think whatever he likes. It's a poor hunter who feels the need to define what prey is.

Her axe is starting to chip at the edge and her blunderbuss's parts are coming loose, so she heads back to the workshop. The doll greets her. Gehrman shows her to how to use blood echoes to repair her weapons. There's a way to improve them, too, but she doesn't have any of the material it calls for, a sort of crystallized blood. She does have the tool she will need, though, taken from a chest in the chapel's study.

She kills a few beasts, then runs across a dead end at a closed gate. It has enough handholds in its elaborate ironwork for her to climb, but there's likely a reason it's closed, so she decides to leave it be until she's checked the other path out of the chapel.

On the way back, she sees one living thing she missed, standing motionless by the railing just outside the chapel. Asuna calls to the figure from a distance, readying her weapons.

The figure turns away from the railing. "A hunter, is it?"

"Asuna."

"Eileen," she says. "You're a bit young for this sort of work, aren't you? And an outsider, to boot. It's a shame you were dragged into this. But the hunt's on tonight. There's no turning back now."

Something about what she said... She isn't from Yharnam either. Not that it matters. They're both here now.

"Are you waiting?" asks Asuna.

"Not for much longer," she says. "Don't go near the tomb below Oedon Chapel in the Cathedral Ward. Henryk, an old hunter, has gone mad."

Asuna starts. "Another one?"

"Another... Oh. Gascoigne must have been yours. Well, I'm sure it had to be done. He was falling apart."

 _ _You'll be one of them, sooner or later.__ "Yes," Asuna agrees. "If you're hunting, I'll help."

"There's no need for that," says Eileen. "He's my mark, and you've done your share."

Asuna doesn't have any idea how many times the graveyard beast killed her. Eileen has only faint traces of the dream on her. She won't wake up again if she dies, any more than the graveyard beast did. Against a mad hunter, one life won't be enough. "I'll help," Asuna says again.

Eileen sighs. She scratches the side of her beaked mask. After a long moment, she says tiredly, "Well, if you're not to be dissuaded, you'd best come along then."

Heathcliff isn't in the chapel. The caretaker is delighted to have another hunter pass through and makes the same request of Eileen that he did of Asuna.

Then they find Henryk.

He doesn't seem mad from a distance. He's making slow rounds between the headstones, the tip of his saw cleaver trailing in the dirt. His gaze doesn't leave the ground. His pistol is holstered; something clutched between his fingers glitters red when the sun's fading glow catches it.

Eileen reaches for her blades. "He'll target you," she says. Asuna nearly asks, but Eileen goes on before she can. "Is this still what you want?"

Asuna measures the distance. Henryk's ambling path is bringing him closer, nearly directly beneath them now. Asuna throws herself over the railing.

Something alerts him. He's moving aside, head tilting up. She doesn't have time to adjust her swing, so her extended axe only catches his left arm below his elbow instead of cleaving his head in half. She lands, rolls to her feet, staggers as his saw stops halfway into her ribs. It's not immediately debilitating, just painful, so she ignores it to focus on putting distance between them, bringing her blunderbuss to bear in the same motion. Henryk ducks behind a gravestone just in time to avoid the spray of silver shot, and Asuna takes the chance to stab a blood vial into her side.

He comes out swinging. He's fast, but he doesn't hit with the same raw force the graveyard beast did. She knocks his saw's teeth aside with her blunderbuss and brings her axe down, making him retreat. For whatever reason, he isn't using his pistol. If she fought him at full strength, he would hardly have to try, but his handicap puts them nearly even.

He darts in again, Asuna forces him back again. If she had any doubts about him being a beast, this puts them to rest. A hunter would try something new after a tactic repeatedly doesn't work. She catches movement behind him, difficult to make out in the shadows, but he attacks her again, and she parries and swings. He steps away, right into Eileen's blades.

He stumbles with a shout, turning to swing his cleaver wildly in Eileen's general direction. Then, just as quickly, he spins around and charges at Asuna, completely ignoring his second opponent. Asuna parries, swings, he moves back, Eileen severs half his spine. He catches himself on his cleaver as he falls and tries to push himself to his feet, but Eileen interrupts the futile attempt with a hole through his neck.

She flicks the blood off her swords and sheathes them. "No injuries?"

Asuna shakes her head. "The madness ruined him."

"It took him harder than the others. I was expecting a difficult fight." She sighs. "He was a skilled hunter."

Asuna pries his fist open. A red brooch, the gold setting painted over in flaking blood. It has a name engraved on it in English letters.

"Viola," says Eileen. "Gascoigne's wife."

"His— Did Henryk...?"

"The blood's too old. I expect he found her nearby and thought to look for her husband in the same area. Gascoigne and he were partners."

If his wife was... Asuna sniffs the brooch, then checks one of the rotting piles of meat sludge Gascoigne was brutalizing when she found him. It's older than the blood on the brooch.

Eileen wordlessly pockets the jewelry. "Thank you for your help. It wasn't necessary, but... it wasn't unappreciated." She glances at Asuna. "Try to keep your hands clean from here on. A hunter should hunt beasts. Leave the hunting of hunters to me."

"I'll try."

Eileen laughs. For all that she's an outsider, her laugh is a Yharnam laugh. Then she stops. She watches for a second. "Looking for something?"

Asuna snaps another of the mad hunter's ribs and pulls it out through the gaping wound in his back, letting it fall to the dirt with the other two. She needs to reach his organs. "Blood stones. Gehrman said they were useful."

"Gehrman did? Well, you won't find any there. One doesn't live long with stones in their heart. You'd have better luck trying a clean corpse."

She pulls her hands out of the slash and wipes her gloves on her pants. "Okay. I'll look."

"Wait." Eileen digs around in a pocket, then she holds out her hand, five translucent red shards in her palm. "You've more use for them than I. We hunters have to take care of our own."

They part ways. Eileen has business in Central Yharnam. Asuna returns to the workshop.


	4. Cathedral Ward

She heads through the chapel's side passage. She finds Alfred at an altar behind a cathedral. For no reason at all, before he even asks her name, he hands her three sheets of fire paper. She can use them to set her axe on fire.

She can use them to _set her axe on fire_.

He doesn't comment when she is too shocked to thank him, simply dives, apropos of nothing, into a history lesson encompassing the Healing Church, Byrgenwerth, Old Yharnam, Cainhurst Castle, and his Master Logarius. He winds down at some point and enthusiastically bids her a good hunt, allowing her to slink away, dazed and confused and three sheets of fire paper richer.

There's a lever on the second floor of the cathedral. She pulls it, and the altar on the first floor slides smoothly back to reveal a staircase. She has enough to deal with at the moment, so she remembers the location and pushes the lever back into place. She doesn't want anything down there getting ideas.

There aren't so many beasts in this area, but the few she does find roaming don't go down easily. She kills them and heads down the stairs. Yharnam is oddly vertical, built in levels like no city she's ever heard of. It seems at times that there are more stairs than flat walkways.

She looks over the railing. She recognizes the section on the other side of the chasm as Central Yharnam, and the great bridge... There's nothing on it, not even corpses.

The wind blows. Blood, sweet and cloying, mixed with the stench of beasts—not coming from the right direction to be her work. Farther down the walkway, something massive raises its head, a silhouette layered over the setting sun.

She wonders why she ran from the bridge earlier. She can't remember her reason. She's a hunter. She hunts beasts. No matter what manner of monster lay in wait, fleeing shouldn't have even crossed her mind.

It doesn't cross it now.

She ducks behind a wagon, close enough to hear its uneven pacing, and lights a Molotov. The pacing stops. She rolls out of cover and throws the bottle.

The explosive shatters against the beast's left shoulder, igniting its fur. The thing staggers back and _screams_.

The sound strikes her like a physical blow. Asuna stumbles too, pressing her hands clenched around her weapons against her ears. She snarls beneath her mask. She hates that sound. She has never before hated anything in her life, yet she recognizes this feeling in the first instant. Beasts don't get to sound like that, like something wounded and dying and _hurting_. They don't get to pretend that they can feel. They gave up that right when they became monsters.

It finally shuts its damn mouth. Asuna grits her teeth and charges forward as it rams its shoulder into a wall to snuff out the flame. By the time she reaches it, it's lowered itself to meet her.

It screams again.

It backhands her as she flinches. The blow sends her straight into a wall in an impact that snaps her arm. Her axe clangs onto the cobbles. She rolls away just before the beast's fists smash down and takes the brief instant before it recovers its stance to stab a blood vial into her arm. It turns to her, she shoots it in the face, and—

She is going to break its mouth and tear out its throat, and Yharnam will be a cleaner place for it.

She retrieves her axe as soon as she can. It's good that she strengthened it—even with a sharper and harder blade, the beast's hide is too tough to part easily. She cuts at its legs, trying to bring it down to where she can put steel between its twisted antlers, until eventually it drops to one knee.

She swings her axe at its head, and it catches the weapon beneath the blade, claws curling tightly around the handle. She shoots it, but the fur on its arm is too thick and matted for her shots to penetrate far enough. It wrenches her weapon away from her and flings it over the railing.

Asuna's eyes widen. She starts to follow it, but it vanishes over the edge before she can make it a few steps, and then the beast swipes at her with a scream and she has to leap back. Her rage boils over in a haze of red. She screams back. When it slashes at her with its overgrown arm, she catches its talons between her own, stopping the motion in its tracks. She squeezes and feels all the bones in its claws shatter beneath her fingers. There, now it has a reason to scream.

For some reason the air in front of its exposed rib cage starts to take on a bloody tint. Asuna doesn't care why, because that infernal sound is still cutting through her. She lights a Molotov and throws it at its head; the glass bottle explodes against the roof of its open maw. Its scream chokes off with a wet gurgle. It claws at its burning mouth, and for the first time that night Asuna laughs.

She darts forward, presses the muzzle of her blunderbuss against where the heart would be on a human, and doesn't stop pulling the trigger until the beast's weight slumps onto the gun's barrel.

She spends enough blood vials to heal herself, then refills them with the beast's blood. There's a dead madman nearby with a ball and chain. She isn't strong enough to lift the ball, so she looks for another weapon. She finds one holding what's ostensibly an axe but better fits the definition of a club. It'll do.

She trudges back to the beast's corpse and hacks off the monster's left arm. She hefts it; it's surprisingly heavy, considering how emaciated it is beneath the fur. It's much easier to handle once she cuts off everything above the wrist. She takes the claw in both hands and smashes the beast's neck and burnt jaw into a pulp.

A little ways along, there's a stairway leading down into a room full of urns. There's a chest there with something called a bloodgem inside, and a locked door beside it that, when she breaks it down, turns out to lead onto the bridge. Her axe isn't on it. It must have fallen into the chasm.

There's nothing else for her here. She makes her way back to the chapel.

A faint thread of music reaches her ears. Someone sits beside the caretaker, face buried in her knees, a music box clasped tightly in her hands. Asuna wouldn't have noticed her but for the white ribbon braided through her hair.

"Ah, the hunter," says the caretaker, turning his face up to her. "Hello. Your friend, the Crow, she brought the gal here. I'm happy, so happy, she's safe now in this here chapel, but... she's not doing so well, poor thing."

The tune ends. Without looking, the girl winds the box up again. Her family is likely dead since she's here on her own. Asuna tries to sympathize, and can't. She misses her home and her brother, yes, and her parents, but it's more nostalgia than grief. It wasn't bad while it lasted, but the world turns on. Anything she says is liable to make the girl feel worse. She makes her excuses.

The messengers greet her when she opens her eyes. They give her a trinket that her inventory informs her is a sword hunter badge. From the description, it might be a reward for killing the bridge beast. It reminds her. She asks, "Can you find my axe? It went over the bridge in Central Yharnam."

She thinks that's a yes. They sink into the ground, and she sits on the steps to wait. She considers talking to Gehrman or the doll, but they're both sleeping. It is late, after all. She closes her eyes.

The messengers return with her axe. She thanks them. The praise seems to make them happy.

The bath messenger has new things for sale. Asuna buys the hunter chief emblem and as many Bold Hunter's Marks as she can afford. Unlike visualizing the Hunter's Mark on its own, concentrating on the marks drawn onto the paper slips won't leave her blood echoes behind when they send her back to the lamp.

At the locked gate outside the chapel, she takes out the hunter's chief emblem. The lever on the other side of the gate swings over.


	5. Grand Cathedral

AN: Bells no longer take into account level when matching up players. They also don't need Insight to ring. The main reasons for the latter are, first, that collecting Insight is much less intuitive in here than it is in the actual game. Using Madman's Knowledge requires a hunter to eat the sparkling, smoking slug wriggling around in a dead body's split skull, which isn't something most players are going to figure out on their own. The other reason is that enemies' strength and abilities correspond to lore rather than gameplay. This does mean enemies no longer scale to party size, but the trade-off is that Great One bosses are going to be nigh impossible to beat solo.

On the matter of rating, how do you feel about the T rating? I'm aware I'm pushing it with the gore, even if Asuna herself is fairly nonchalant about most of it by this point. Does anyone think it should go up to M?

* * *

She doesn't cut the golden pendant from the beast's death grip. If someone sane stops by expecting to find the woman who was here, let it tell them what happened. What she does do is cut the arm holding it off and kick it to the side before setting alight the rest of the body.

The scent of burning fur makes her feel a little better. Good riddance. She doesn't remember how many times she died because the beast's absurdly long fur tripped her up or snagged on her axe or stopped her from seeing the beast about to smash her into the floor. She tried several times to burn it off while they fought, but the beast had an irritating trick that could not only dowse the flames, but also regrow its singed fur and close its wounds.

Something changes in her peripheral. She looks up at the altar at the end of the room. It has a beast skull on it in a place of worship, which she already takes issue with, but now it looks like there's a dim light roiling inside the skull. She doubts it's immediately dangerous, not if the messengers feel secure enough to set up a lamp directly front of it, but she still wants exactly no part of it. She throws a Molotov from beside the lamp. The cloth catches, the candles topple every which way, bone dust and fragments scatter into the air. The glow vanishes, or at least is hidden by the fire.

In the dream, the fountain by the door of the workshop is occupied. The messenger waves her over. Like the one by the doll, it's selling supplies and equipment, but it deals in a different currency. Apparently she has twelve counts of Insight, whatever that is.

It also has different wares. She lingers over Gascoigne's and Henryk's clothes. Why is the messenger selling those? How is the messenger selling those? Did it go back and strip their corpses because it thought she might want to wear two dead madmen's hand-me-downs? It means well, she knows, but that's just... bizarre.

The other items are more tempting. She buys the beckoning and small resonant bells the moment she realizes what they do. The messenger enlists some of its fellows to bear the items out of the water, but they don't give them to her or take their payment immediately like the one who trades in blood echoes does.

The sinister resonant bell and silencing blank give her pause. The implications bother her. She buys the silencing blank, but leaves the bell.

The messengers offer her the purchases. As soon as she takes them, lightness washes over her, starting from behind her eyes and moving down until her whole body feels like it's floating. She reaches for her axe, startled—she felt the same thing when the mad creature with tentacles for a mouth stabbed the glowing appendage sprouting from its head through her skull, albeit that was considerably more painful. But her reaction is sluggish and uncoordinated, her hand missing her weapon entirely, and the feeling passes quickly. When it does, the fountain's surface lies unbroken, the messengers gone.

What exactly did she trade away?

Gehrman is uncharacteristically cagey on the subject. "No need to think that hard about it. Just... go out there; kill some beasts. Set some fires. It'll do you good."

The doll is more forthcoming. "It affects how much of the dream you may perceive."

"Like the fountain messenger. And you."

"That's right."

"Where did I get it from? I don't remember picking anything up."

"Ah," says the doll. "Good hunter... that is a frightful path to tread. My telling you would only cause harm. If you would know, you must seek the knowledge yourself."

The doll starts to say something else, but Asuna is already leaving. She won't find the answer to her question in the dream. Anyway, Gehrman would have let her know if it was dangerous. It's probably not something to worry about.

The cathedral beast's room seems darker, and not only because the fire has gone out. The sun has finally set. It's truly night now.

She takes out both bells. Which one...?

She settles on the resonant bell. She doesn't need any help, but another hunter might.

It's not quite the same as dreaming. She hears another bell, faint enough that she thinks it at first the echo of her own. The cathedral fades away, and she's outside, the sun not yet completely set. Two hunters stand on the steps above her.

"I don't know you," says the girl as she puts away the bell hanging from her belt. She's wearing Henryk's outfit sized to fit her small body and has for weapons a saw spear, a pistol, and a line of throwing knives. "I'm Argo. Thanks for coming. I've already got dark and mysterious here, but another body's always useful."

"Asuna."

The boy beside her has clothes similar to Asuna's, but his have more material involved. He has a rifle spear and a pistol. She can't see much of his expression with the mask, but he seems surprised. "You're level one."

"What?" says Asuna.

"What?" says Argo in a very different tone.

"You killed Gascoigne and the blood-starved beast like that?"

"What are you on about?" He's looking at her strangely. She doesn't care for it.

"Hold off on killing your doll next time and let it tell you about channeling—"

"Killing the doll?" she repeats, the arrangement of the words alien on her tongue. "Are you—"

Argo interrupts her with a low whistle. "You're really level one? Jesus. I'm overleveled like you wouldn't believe, and I still needed help for Gascoigne, even with the music box."

"What are levels?"

After a silence, Argo says, "Is this your first video game?"

"I..."

"Fucking Kayaba," Argo bites out. " _Fucking_ Kayaba. Don't worry, we'll get out of this. The difficulty is insane, but the game's designed pretty linearly. We'll reach the end as long as we keep following the plot."

"...If you don't need help, I'm going," says Asuna, reaching for the silencing blank.

"Stop," says Argo quickly, moving a step down the stairs. "Sorry about getting after you like that. We were surprised. Kii-bou's going to fight Amelia for me. Do you want to come with?"

"Amelia?"

"A pain in the ass." She clarifies: "She's the boss in the cathedral down there."

The cathedral beast. "I'll come."

"Great!" She turns to her companion. "Lead the way, Kiri-bou."

It's not a difficult journey. They're close to the cathedral, and most of the beasts have been disposed of already. One lunges out of a doorway, but it's dead before its hind legs cross the threshold, a knife in its throat, a bullet through its eye, and a blade in its back.

"Are we the first people you've talked to since the game started?" Argo's companion asks.

Surely he can smell the dream on her? "No."

"I meant real people."

She frowns. Of course he did. There's hardly such a thing as fake people. The doll and messengers are as real as Gehrman or herself. "Obviously."

But then, apparently he murdered the doll in his dream, so she knows he has a skewed perception of reality. He'll be a beast before the night is over. If Argo has any sense, she'll put him down once he's mad enough to stop dreaming. Asuna doesn't think she will, though. The previous owner of Argo's outfit let his partner fall as far as he did without intervening, and the graveyard beast's death brought Henryk low too. For her sake, Asuna hopes her companion will hold it off for a little longer.

"...They're NPCs," he says. "Non-player characters. Their AIs are so advanced that they can modify their dialogue to fit different stimuli, but they're still nothing more than programs people wrote. They're not real. This is a video game. You can't forget that."

No, really, what is he on about? "They're as real as the dream."

"...Right," he says. "And the dream's part of the game."

"That doesn't make it less real."

"Asuna-san—"

"If a beast tears your guts out," says Asuna, "will you feel it?"

"Just because Kayaba turned the pain receptivity onto max doesn't make it real," he says. He sounds frustrated, mirroring Asuna's mounting irritation. "Our bodies outside aren't affected by what the NerveGear simulates."

"Doesn't—"

She breaks off. She can smell the cathedral beast. "It's close."

"Aa-chan," says Argo. It takes a moment for Asuna to realize she's being addressed. "Have you fought her before?"

"Killed it."

"On your own at your starting level. Have I mentioned yet that I am impressed? If I haven't, I'm saying it now." She blows out a breath. "Kiri-bou, put the argument away. We've got a vicar to slay."

They stop outside the closed doors. "Alright," says Argo. "I'd prefer if none of us died, so let's go over this real quick. She attacks mainly with her right hand, because her left is holding her necklace, but sometimes she'll put them together and try to smash you, which nobody wants to get hit by. Also, just because she's right-handed doesn't mean she doesn't use her left at all—really, just keep an eye on both. She bites, too, so remember that—if she gets her mouth around you, you're pretty much dead, so don't let that happen. Once she's damaged enough, she gets more aggressive and starts using a healing move; on the other hand, her moveset also gets more predictable, and if you can get her necklace away from her somehow she won't be able to use her heal. She's weak to serrated damage and fire. I'm the only one with a saw, so the serrated damage is out, but keep the fire in mind. If she grabs someone, she'll be occupied, so the other two should take the chance to try to get in a fatal hit, and, failing that, at least get her to drop the person. If someone's injured, I'll switch in for them so they can shoot up a vial.

"Kii-bou's our DPS, our main damage dealer. Aa-chan, you'll have to be the tank. You don't have to try to get any hits in, just keep dodging and annoy her as much as possible, keep her attention off Kii-bou, but you're going to be in the most danger. You okay with that?"

That's right. Argo's not good at combat, which seems strange for a hunter, but since she's made it this far she has an effective way of compensating. Her companion, by his weapons, fights from range. Asuna will be the only one near enough to the beast for it to hit her.

"You can back out if you feel pressured," Argo's companion adds. "I can keep her pinned down, and you can engage again when you're ready. I'll kill her as quickly as I can."

Asuna pushes the doors open. In the center of the cathedral, a woman kneels on the floor, her back hunched over and her hands clasped in prayer. She's too far away to reach quickly, and a firearm at this range won't kill her. Asuna charges forward, pulling out her axe and lighting a Molotov, as the woman screams and her bones burst from her skin in a spray of gore.

 _Hello again_. She throws the incendiary; it hits while the beast is still shaking itself out. Its fur catches like tinder.

It throws itself at Asuna. She leaps out of the way as its balled claws come crashing down, ducks a wild bunch of flaming fur. It swipes at her; its claws clip her, tearing ragged slashes down her side and sending her flying. She rolls to her feet and automatically ducks to the side when a report rings through the cathedral. She remembers a moment later that it's from Argo's companion.

The beast staggers, pressing a claw to the weeping hole behind its nose. A second circle appears just above that, tearing into the bandages wrapped loosely around its face. Then it puts its claws together in the posture it takes to heal itself. Asuna pulls out a Molotov, waits as the injuries close and the fire burns to nothing, then tosses it.

It roars again, but doesn't stagger. It brings its claws down. Asuna dodges the first hit, the second, third, the margin narrower each time, until the fourth comes down on her shoulder.

It completely crushes her arm out of the socket. She struggles to rise, her legs trembling, and just manages to stagger to her feet when the fur trailing on the ground slides out from under her, sending her back to the floor. The beast raises its flame-wreathed arms over its head.

Blood showers down, and its owner falls back with a roar.

"Aa-chan, switch!"

Asuna scrambles away, leaving her mangled arm behind, while Argo races past her, fingers bristling with knives. With a shaking hand, she slides her axe through her belt and stabs a blood vial into the remains of her shoulder. Skin stretches over the raw flesh. She won't be able to reattach her arm, but it stops the bleeding and gives her back control of her body.

Argo's companion's bullets do much more damage than Asuna's ever gotten out of her blunderbuss. They tear straight through the curtains of fur to sink deep into the beast's body, and she can't tell for sure, but she thinks they're exploding once they stop moving. The beast's left claw doesn't resemble anything anymore. The necklace is on the floor, a glint of gold amidst the pools of red.

Argo, meanwhile, is terrible. She's faster than Asuna, stronger, better able to take a hit, but for all that she's physically able, she simply doesn't know how to fight. Her movements are clumsy, desperate, hesitant, and she can't read her enemy's well-broadcasted cues. The beast grabs her and throws her across the room, then turns instead to the hunter steadily blasting it apart.

Asuna draws her axe and pulls her mask down. As she runs at the beast, Argo's companion takes out its knees. Asuna leaps onto its back, biting onto its burning fur to keep herself in place. The light and smoke blind her completely, but she doesn't need to see or smell for this. She spits the fur out, pushes herself farther up, grabs hold again, and keeps going until her teeth close around scalding heat and nothing else. She swings her axe down. She can't tell what she's hitting with most of her nerves burnt, but by the heavy resistance she guesses at bone, so she does it again. Her axe's arc carries it farther this time.

The body beneath her drops. She slips off the side, lands on her back on a flat, solid surface.

"Asuna-san!" She doesn't hear any more roaring besides the flames', so she guesses the fight's over.

A blood vial goes directly into her heart. It's a waste. Blood has its limits. Her arm is gone, and she doesn't think anything can unburst eyeballs. She visualizes the Hunter's Mark in her mind—nothing happens. She's in the wrong Yharnam. She tries to tell Argo's companion to kill her, but her mouth is dry and she can't feel her tongue. He goes on trying to heal her. The muscles in her remaining arm grow back enough for her to lift her axe, and she lets the blade fall on her chest.

She opens her eyes to the dream. She makes a fist, opens it, wiggles her fingers. Her hand doesn't respond any differently than usual. She's lost limbs before, even had beasts eat them off her, so she knows the dream still counts them as part of her even if they're not attached, but it's reassuring to affirm it.

That went well. They killed the cathedral beast on their first try with almost no deaths, nor even a serious injury. She doesn't think the other two hunters had to use a single vial of blood between them, ignoring the ones they tried to fix her with. She doesn't understand what that was about. They should have just sent her back to the dream.

Interacting with them was tiring, Argo's companion especially. She doesn't want to have to talk to anyone again for a little while. She goes to the garden behind the workshop and sits in a patch of flowers, leaning back against a headstone. The moon is alone in the starless sky. She keeps it quiet company.


	6. Old Yharnam: Klein

AN: Ryoutarou is Klein's real name.

* * *

"Did they get the message?" Ryoutarou asks. The messengers nod, and he can't hold back the relieved sigh. He still doesn't know how this will work, or if it will at all—Kayaba could so easily be messing with them again—but baby steps. Part one is over.

The game doesn't give any time cues of its own, so he counts the seconds. Part two comes back pretty quickly. _on 5_.

On five, he rings the bell. Nothing sounds. It's silent and he isn't moving it anymore, but the rod in the center is still swinging. He knows that means it's working, but he gives it another shake to be sure.

"You've rung it. Your friends will hear," says Djura. When Ryoutarou first stepped into Old Yharnam, Djura tried to riddle him full of holes with a gatling gun that _would not_ run out of ammunition. He eased off it a bit once he realized Ryoutarou was running past the beasts rather than attacking them, and the goodwill built up from that was enough for him to refrain from immediately shooting Ryoutarou off the ladder up the side of his tower.

After Ryoutarou talked him down, he's been pretty friendly. Gruff and with a kind of unsettling attitude toward murder—he doesn't _like_ killing people, but he gives it about as much moral gravity as washing the dishes or feeding the cat—but, that aside, pretty friendly.

Ryoutarou shakes the bell another time. "Are you sure?"

Movement has him looking up to see a familiar face.

"Haruka!" He can't help it; he throws his arms around his friend with a whoop. Haruka jerks and half-draws his saw spear before he relaxes.

"Good to see you," Haruka says. Ryoutarou steps away, grinning hard enough that his cheeks ache. Their group has been keeping in touch through the messengers, and the support has been invaluable. Ryoutarou doesn't think any one of them would have lasted so long without it. It can't compare to meeting in person, though. Haruka's changed. Ryoutarou knows he has too, but it hurts more seeing what Kayaba's madness has done to his friend.

Haruka looks about, glancing back to check his blind spot, and draws up short when he sees the old ash-clad hunter. He draws his weapon fully this time, but Ryoutarou grabs his hands before he can raise them.

"Djura-san's not an enemy."

Haruka freezes. "Wait. He's not?"

"Damn it, man!"

"Shit," says Haruka, eyes wide. "Fuck, sorry, I, uh, I killed your friend down there. I didn't kill you, though? You kicked my ass when I tried. Literally. Right over the edge. Hurt a ton."

Djura takes this much better than Ryoutarou would. "Are the people from your homeland illiterate? I had a sign up. It wasn't for decoration."

"I couldn't find a way around," Haruka mutters.

"There's nothing left in these burnt ruins. You had no cause to come here."

"Every other way was closed, what else was I supposed to do?"

"Alright, that's enough," says Ryoutarou. "Thanks for letting me stay here, Djura-san. We'll leave you alone."

They climb to the platform midway down the tower. "The other one, did he have a name too?" Haruka asks.

"Erik. You couldn't have reasoned with him. He remembers Djura-san, he remembers that beasts are good and hunters are bad, but the rest is gone."

"You knew not to kill him."

"Look, don't beat yourself up over it. They're—"

The word dies as his brain catches up to his mouth. NPCs. Non-player characters. That's what they are. It's a simple statement of fact. So why would saying it feel like a lie?

"You couldn't have known," he says instead. In the least awkward subject change ever, he asks, "How long do you think we'll have to wait for Daiichi?"

Haruka makes a noncommittal sound at the question. "Mm."

So far, the three of them are the only ones of their group to have unlocked the Insight shop. It seems to have something to do with Iosefka. The first few times Ryoutarou spoke to the woman, she wouldn't open the door, not wanting the plague to spread to her patients, but gave him vials of blood that healed much more than the normal ones did whenever he dropped by. Then, all of a sudden, she changed her mind. Like the creature in Oedon Chapel, she offered her clinic as a safe haven, saying she could do more good that way than by blocking access, and stopped offering blood. Ryoutarou carried Gilbert there to see if she could at least keep his illness from worsening, even though there was something... off about the way she spoke. It wasn't anything specific; she just felt a little more selfish, a little colder, even though the offer to open her doors was such a kind one. Ryoutarou thought he was being uncharitable for suspecting her.

The niggling doubt was enough, though, to convince him to go back. Just to check. Not even Kayaba would disguise an enemy as a kind doctor. He only had to put his paranoia to rest.

Gilbert was still alive when he broke the door down. Incoherent, but alive—up until the woman put a stop to that too. She nearly killed Ryoutarou before he could visualize the Hunter's Mark. She wandered the streets, targeting anything that moved, shooting at windows, and collecting the glowing slugs that lived in the skulls of some corpses. Ryoutarou tried to stop her at Oedon Chapel. She killed him without particularly trying and then holed up inside with the creature and the two women Ryoutarou had taken there earlier, extinguishing the lamp and blocking the other entrances with the corpses of the beasts she had slain.

He fought through the Cathedral Ward, collecting blood echoes to level up, looking for anything that could give him an edge. Instead of a weapon or item, he found Alfred, who pieced the story together from his frantic, panicked plea, and Eileen the Crow, who was waiting tensely outside the cathedral until she had a better idea of what was behind the wall of corpses. Between the three of them, they took her down, even though Ryoutarou was more hindrance than help.

There was a discussion afterwards about what to do with the things she turned the refugees in the chapel into. They did nothing besides aimlessly wander about the building, occasionally stopping to stare into a corner. Alfred was of the opinion they should put them out of their misery. Eileen, after a bit more consideration, agreed.

Ryoutarou sent messages to his friends, asking if any of them had helped Iosefka. Haruka and Daiichi had: they both had decided she seemed more trustworthy than the ragged, misshapen creature in the chapel. Most of the others were planning to or didn't know she existed. He warned them to stay away, but couldn't bring himself to tell them why.

When he returned to the lamp inside the chapel, Alfred was waiting with an offer to accompany him for a time. They went to the clinic, found the thing there that had been the real Iosefka. The older hunter handled it while Ryoutarou checked out the other rooms. There was a gilded envelope addressed to him sitting on a table. Alfred explained it was a summons from Cainhurst Castle and asked that Ryoutarou bring him along as a guest when he had the chance to answer it.

Afterwards, they cleared out what parts of the Cathedral Ward were accessible. He left Alfred at the entrance to Old Yharnam.

"...How are you holding up?" Ryoutarou asks.

"How are _you_ holding up?" Haruka replies.

Ryoutarou laughs. "I don't even know."

"I didn't realize I missed those," says Haruka.

"Missed what?"

"A real laugh. I thought you, at least..." He shakes his head. "This place is so damn _depressing_ all the time. Like, usually grimdark tries too hard for me to take it seriously, but Yharnam is actually awful."

"Yeah," says Ryoutarou. "Yeah. Even the doll— I like her, but she's not exactly a fountain of unicorns and sunshine either." Not unless the unicorns are murderous abominations and the sunshine is bright enough to obscure vision. He clears his throat. "You want to stay here for a bit before we go after the boss?"

"Yeah," says Haruka. "Let's do that."

They sit on the platform with their backs against the tower. Before Yharnam, they would have let their legs hang over the edge.

"How does the bell thing work?" Haruka asks.

"The game usually matches up people who ring their bells at the same time. It isn't a guarantee, though." Kayaba wouldn't make anything that easy. "We might get a stranger."

" _Fuck_ Kayaba."

"Yeah, it's stupid."

"How did you figure that out?"

"I tested the bell a couple of times before I messaged you guys," says Ryoutarou. "I figured out how the PvP works—"

"There are hunters who play PvP?"

Ryoutarou winces. "Only assholes. It's, well, basically after you ring the beckoning bell, there's a chance a woman will show up someplace nearby ringing the PvP bell. As long as she's ringing it, there's a chance of another hunter showing up. Only good thing is they're pretty easy to tell apart from the co-op hunters—they're completely black with a red outline, and you can't talk to or hear them. And they can't interact with the world outside of other players.

"Anyway, so I tried out the co-op bell and got a beta tester. Most of the hunters who've made it out to here are beta testers. They've been trading with each other—information, skills, materials. They actually kind of have an idea about what's happening."

"Oh," Haruka breathes.

Ryoutarou laughs. "I yelled at him when he told me. They just— left us out to hang. They know more about Yharnam than anyone, but they didn't even try to help. ...So I yelled at him, and he just stood there and took it, didn't even try to defend himself. Then I tried to kill him. Didn't work out too hot. I stopped when I calmed down enough to figure out it wasn't going to happen, and— he must have felt bad. Something like that. He told me everything they've figured out so far, including the bell trick."

Haruka's shaking. Ryoutarou sighs as Haruka says, "Fuck them. Fuck Kayaba, fuck the beta testers, fuck the people who haven't woken us up yet. Fuck all of them." He takes a ragged breath. "Fuck _all_ of them. I— goddamn it. Just— god _damn_ it. I hate this."

Now, of course, is the perfect time for the third member of their party, who is far too small to be Daiichi, to materialize. Ryoutarou has to wonder if Kayaba's doing it on purpose. It's a silly thing to wonder about, because of course he is.

Haruka leaps to his feet, drawing his saw spear in the same motion. The other hunter shoots him before the weapon reaches them, staggering him, and stops their axe against his ribcage.

"Have you gone mad?" the hunter snarls, biting the dull blade into padded leather.

Haruka makes no move to back down. "Oh, not enough to be a beta tester, you have to be a roleplayer too, you little—"

Ryoutarou grabs his shoulder and pulls him back hard enough that he nearly falls, only catching himself on the tower wall. "Calm down! I get you're angry, but you can't just attack someone on sight."

"You know what they did! They don't deserve to live! Get out of the way, Ryoutarou, let me kill her!"

"Look at her! She's a _kid_ , you idiot!"

" _Gascoigne's daughter_ was a kid!" All of Ryoutarou's emotion drains away in an instant, leaving him cold. There's nothing he can say to that. "And that kid _died_ because of this bitch!"

"Gascoigne's daughter?" the hunter echoes.

"If I knew what you beta testers do, I could have saved her," Haruka says. "Do you understand that? It's your fault she died! You killed her, you monster!"

"...No, I didn't." Her mask and the shadow of her hat conceal her expression, but she sounds almost contemplative.

Haruka ducks away from Ryoutarou's grab and lunges forward with a shout. The hunter steps aside from the swing, bringing up her gun, and pulls the trigger at point-blank range in Haruka's face.

"So you still dream," she says as his body fades. "Watch yourself, hunter."

It takes a moment for Ryoutarou to recover his voice. "You— What did..."

"You need to keep a better leash on your partner."

"You killed him!"

"If he's yet sane, it will be learning experience," she says sharply. "Attacking unprovoked is madness."

"You _murdered_ my _friend_ ," he says. Maybe it will sink in if she hears it twice. It's not her killing Haruka that's the problem (that technically did qualify as self defense, even though he really wants to make it the issue) so much as it is that she doesn't seem to care. She honestly used a one-liner. The flippancy is disconcerting enough coming from Djura, but this is a girl who can't be older than seventeen. "You could have stopped him without killing him."

"Why would I do that?"

Ryoutarou stares at her for a while, trying to understand. Eventually, he just fires a silencing blank. Then he messages Haruka and Daiichi again. Daiichi responds that he's helping another hunter, but Haruka sets up a time.

"You let her get away?" he demands, gesturing with his weapon. His left eye blinks more often than his right, as if he wants to make sure it's still there. Ryoutarou sympathizes. Dying doesn't ever get easier.

"Do you think I could have won against her?" he asks tiredly. He ignores the part of him that rails against the idea that a sixteen, seventeen year old girl who isn't even well-built for her age could beat him in a straight fight. Yharnam will burn away what remains of his pride soon enough.

Haruka works his mouth, the movement of his jaw visible through his mask. Then he turns around and swings his arm into the wall. He presses his head against the bricks. "Fucking beta testers." He takes a deep breath. "Ryoutarou, can you give me a minute? I can't fight a boss right now."

Ryoutarou sits down and counts out fifteen minutes. "I learned something else," he says. Haruka pushes himself off the wall to face him. "We don't actually need to beat the boss down here."

"Huh?"

"On the altar behind it, there's a chalice," says Ryoutarou. "That's all you need to open up the next area. The boss isn't the objective, it's there to guard the chalice."

"So, what, I distract it, you grab the item?"

"Seems easier than actually fighting the thing," says Ryoutarou. "...Actually, I've... been thinking about the hunt. About what Djura-san said."

"...Okay?"

Ryoutarou braces himself for the words that are about to come out of his mouth. "I'm going to do a pacifist run."

Haruka says, "Um." He adds, "Ryoutarou, I'm not really sure that's possible. Literally the whole point of this game is to kill stuff."

"Fuck Kayaba. I don't care if it's possible, I'm doing it starting with this boss."

After a moment, Haruka starts laughing. "I don't think it'll work, but I'll help you try. Let's go when Daiichi gets here."


	7. Hunter's Dream: Argo

AN: Rating changed to M. Asuna has indeed started spending blood echoes on levels, although she's still rather behind the other players who've made it this far.

Shouichi is XaXa's real name.

* * *

Argo silences her bell without looking away from Shouichi's list of the lootable corpses of Yahar'gul, pulling her hand off the hilt of her saw spear. She recognizes the footsteps. "Kii-bou, hey."

He sits in the flowers beside her, feet on the cobblestone path below the low wall, leaving a little distance between them. Argo blinks and looks over. His outfit is a red a few shades darker than blood, the edges trimmed in white. It's padded more heavily and thoroughly than other armor sets, giving protection at the cost of speed and mobility. For a player like Kirito, who relies on keeping his distance in (and out of) fights, it would be an odd choice if not for the effects of that covenant's oath rune.

"That's a new look," she says. Her eyes linger on the lower half of his face. The Knight Set does have a hat with a brim to keep blood out of its wearer's eyes, but it offers no such protection for the mouth and nose. He's even prettier than she expected. "I didn't peg you for the type to join a covenant."

"I did it for the Caryll rune," he says. It's oddly pleasant to see someone's face being so expressive. Most people, as far as Argo's heard, lower their masks in their dreams, but to invite another player into one's dream is an uncommon show of trust. Argo generally meets with people in Oedon.

"I hope it's worth it." They haven't found a way yet to unequip Caryll runes. The things are effectively permanent, and Blood, while useful and arguably broken, is extremely unpleasant to use. Well, extremely unpleasant to watch someone else use, which counts out to the same thing in Argo's book. It temporarily increases every stat except skill, which it lowers, and all the player has to do to activate it is drink two filled blood vials. It apparently doesn't taste that bad.

"It doesn't taste that bad," says Kirito.

"Whatever you say. More importantly, where did you meet Heathcliff?"

"The woods. He was on the roof of one of the houses in the village."

Argo grimaces. "That is _bizarre_. _He's_ bizarre. What was he even doing there?"

"He didn't give me an answer when I asked," Kirito says. "You've been asking around about him nearly since the beginning. Is he important?"

"Obviously I can't say for certain, but I'm ninety-five percent sure that yes, he is. Putting aside for the moment the question of what exactly Insight is, I've been figuring out how you get the stuff. Most boss fights give four, one on the first encounter and three on defeat, although the blood-starved beast and the two Hemwick witches together each only give two on defeat. The brainsucker can steal two if it hits you with that attack. Giving NPCs to Iosefka nets either one or two per person, depending on whether the player has an idea what she's doing with them; managing to convince her to give a really shitty explanation of what she's trying to do also gets you two. Getting successfully taken to the Hypogean Gaol by a snatcher is one. Killing another player in someone else's game is one, doesn't matter if it's with the sinister or the resonant bell, and assisting with a boss is one—that one has to be done with a resonant bell, since being summoned with a sinister bell doesn't let a player interact with the environment. Finding the workshop the dream is based on is two. Eating a slug is one, eating the umbilical cord is three." Those last two aren't from personal experience, thank everything worth thanking.

"And seeing Heathcliff is two."

" _Yes_ ," Argo says, letting the sound drag on the end. She opens her notebook and flips through the meticulously sketched maps on the first pages. "Yes, exactly. Why? How is he different from, let's say, Djura, who's also a covenant leader?"

She shows the book to Kirito, who marks Heathcliff's location with a small H. She compares it to the other H's dotted across the maps. "Djura doesn't try to turn players into vampires," says Kirito. He's making a joke; it's adorable. She smiles a little without looking up from the notebook.

"Probably that's a part of it. Plus he knows more than he's letting on. A lot more than he's letting on." She knows that smug, condescending little smile of Heathcliff's. It's one she used to practice in the mirror during the beta. "And there's just something weird about him. There is not a single other powerful NPC who uses a shield or armor that heavy. He doesn't have any patterns to his movements—every person who's seen him so far has told me a different place, none of them with any connection to each other, and nobody can ever find him more than once, even the people who join the covenant. I wish I could know the times people see him at, figure out if that matters somehow, but there's no way to measure time here. And his Caryll rune is unbelievably unbalanced, _and_ he's the only NPC who's alright with being attacked. He's obviously connected to the main plot _some_ how."

"But we don't have enough information yet to know how," says Kirito. "There's not a point to trying to figure it out until then. What did you want to talk to me about?"

She makes a disgruntled noise. The key to getting out of this game is finding the plot, and one of the keys to finding the plot is Heathcliff, who's being extremely uncooperative. Fucking Kayaba. It's just like him to turn even something as simple as the entire point of the game into some great edgy mystery of mysteriousness. Sadist.

Still, Kirito's right. She'll keep trying, but there isn't going to be any miraculous breakthrough within the next thirty minutes. She can put it off for a bit.

She does have a specific idea she wants to bounce off him. She doesn't always. Fairly often she calls him over and simply speaks all her thoughts aloud. They're both loners by nature, but they're not that rare kind who can live entirely without other people. For Argo, it's not any different from talking to the doll or the graves, and for Kirito, there's no effort involved in just listening, or in tuning her out if he grows tired even of that. It's a painless way of keeping them grounded.

"Aa-chan," she says. "What do you think of her?"

"Asuna?" Kirito's eyes flick to the moon that dominates the sky in the dream, his mouth tightening in a frown. It's been a while since the time they summoned her, but she's not a person it's possible to forget. "She's..." He's clearly searching for something more polite than "an utter mess".

Argo huffs a silent laugh. "If you think what she did against Amelia was insane, you should hear some of the stories from the other beta testers who've summoned her."

Kirito blinks at her. "I'm... not sure what to say to that."

"How about you're very, very glad she's a co-op player and not an invader?" she says. "Anywho, I was thinking she might not actually be a player."

"You think she's an NPC?" Kirito considers the theory. "No," he says after a moment, "she's a person."

"How are you sure?"

"I followed Kayaba for a long time before the game came out. I have— well, I obviously didn't know him as well as I thought I did, but all of it couldn't have been fake. I have an idea of how he does things. NPC hunters exist in the world already, and player hunters have to be summoned. Those are the rules he's set. He won't change them."

"She acts more like an NPC than the NPCs do," Argo points out.

"Then that's on her, not Kayaba." A moment passes. "I said that wrong."

"Eh." She waves it off. "I still really want her to be an NPC, though. Because if she's not..."

Asuna started off the game in a much worse position than nearly anyone else, true, even among the regular players, and for all anyone knows she might easily have had a mental condition even before Bloodborne happened. She's a distinct outlier. But she's a stark reminder that the worst case scenario is as possible as the best. The game's only just started. They haven't even discovered the plot yet. Who's to say the rest of them won't join her at the bottom by the time this is finished?

This game is a prison. They have to get out—and they will, of that there's no question. When they do, though... In this world, they're the hunters. In the other, will they be the madmen instead, to be corralled and locked away?

"If she's not?"

"Do you have family, Kiri-bou?"

Kirito stiffens. It's basic etiquette in any online game to not ask about the real world unless the other player volunteers the information themselves. "...Yes."

"Do they love you?"

He stares at her, eyes narrowed in the shadow of his cap. He nods once.

She bites back a smile. "Good. Are you staying?"

He stands. "I want to check the church by the cathedral. See what's there."

"You want to follow the directions of the tonsil stone NPC?" she says. "The one the item description literally calls dubious?"

"It's worth a look."

"Come on, Kii-bou, it's obviously a trap."

"I'll use a Mark if I can't take it. If there's a powerful item there, we can't afford not to at least look."

"Well, be careful anyway," says Argo, turning back to the notebook as Kirito fires a silencing blank. "Let me know how it goes."

Kirito's boots don't fade from her peripheral. She looks up. He's still there, turning the small firearm between his hands. She watches him pull the trigger again.

She checks her bell, but it definitely isn't ringing. She hisses a breath. "Fuck Kayaba, what is it now?" She tries her own blank. When nothing happens, she finds her feet. "Follow me, Kii-bou."

The doll is standing in her usual place at the foot of the hill, docile and placid as ever. She looks over when they approach. "Good hunters, what is it you desire?" she greets.

"His silencing blank isn't working," Argo says, jabbing a thumb at Kirito. "Neither's mine, for that matter. What's up with that, do you know?"

"You have kept the path between your worlds open often and for long enough that they have bled into each other. This dream has become a shared one, just as the waking world to which it leads has done."

"Mm. 'kay," says Argo. "How does that work? Is it just the two of us, or can there be more? Can we split back again?"

"Your two worlds have been inseparably merged. To divide them, or to add another, would be tear this new world at the seams."

She turns to Kirito. "I'll admit, this was _unexpected_ ," she says slowly.

"Did you know this was a thing?" Kirito looks about as bemused as she feels.

"Not at all," Argo admits. "But I'm not sure it's bad. If we can still summon two co-op players, we could have four-man teams for fights, and this way you won't have to clear your own area and then help me with mine. I guess it does mean we'll have to split echoes and items, but I never did much fighting anyway, so you can take my share without any guilt."

How do the NPCs factor in? Argo's tried to build up relationships with hers, but Kirito's fiercely isolationist on that front, and the NPCs they've managed to keep alive to now are different from each other's. As for the world itself, Argo hasn't explored far into the woods yet, but Kirito's found the back entrance to the clinic already, killed Iosefka, and taken his Cainhurst invitation.

Kirito, after a pause, glances at the gravestones that lead to Yharnam. "That'll work," he says. "I'm going."

"Don't die," she calls after him. A cluster of messengers sprouting from the ground draws her attention away. She scribbles an answer to the request for information about Vicar Amelia's strategy as Kirito vanishes from the dream.


	8. Byrgenwerth Lecture Building

AN: What is this Kirito x Asuna of which you speak? Clearly the main relationship in this story is Asuna x Hunter Axe x lots of fire. In all honesty, though, the original idea was they would be good friends who would probably become romantically involved after the game ended, but then they actually met and that plan clearly didn't work out the way it was supposed to.

In case this was bothering anyone, nobody's figured out the cosmic horror aspect of the game because Lovecraft, for one reason or another, never published any of his writing in this universe. Bloodborne is the first ever example of the genre.

* * *

Asuna enters the church, a circular room with a high ceiling and the walls spaced with statues in are no hiding spots. It's empty aside from her. She pauses by the door, an uneasy feeling prickling the hairs on the back of her neck. It might well be nothing aside from the association she's come to make between churches and cathedrals and the more tenacious beasts, but she lights a Molotov regardless and tosses it low at the set of large doors across from the entrance.

The fireball licks up the polished wood, trying for a hold and finding none. Asuna makes her way forwards as the last of the sparks are fading.

An ember drifting upwards flares into a flame.

Asuna steps back, drawing her gun. She switched out her blunderbuss for a Ludwig's rifle looted off a mad hunter. The recoil of the new weapon is harder, but it's easier to handle with its shorter barrel, has a longer range, and does more damage. She fires it at the wall above the door. The scattershot vanishes into the air long before it touches stone. Within a few shots, Asuna starts to make out a shape, something... large, with...

A migraine pulses into existence behind her eyes. Her skull is being shredded from the inside. Pain floods out her thoughts.

Contact. Something around her, holding her in. Her feet leave the ground. And then— she isn't—

The dream washes over her, returning her mind to her.

But when she looks, she isn't in the dream, or even the church where... she was lifted up and crushed like rotten fruit. An unlit lamp rises from the floor. Past that a massive hallway extends, more open space in one area than she's seen all night, and she's automatically backing away from the center before she can make note of anything more than its size. She finds cover behind a pillar.

There's an off smell, ugly and acrid, yet the first thought that comes to her is that it reminds her of the dream. She can hear something moving. Fluid, with a rhythm to it that doesn't fit a liquid. She can't tell where it's coming from with the echoes the hallway creates.

She stays by the pillar, motionless, listening and waiting, but nothing changes in the hall. She edges out for long enough to light the lamp.

Movement catches her attention from behind the window of one of the doors. An undercurrent of soured blood and worse permeates the hall, but no beasts. She walks closer.

The top of a bald, sickly pale head appears behind a crack in the pane, followed by an eye that moves quickly aside. A laugh filters through. "What a joy it is, to behold the divine. You're in my debt, you know. You're nigh on a beast of the field, but here you are, treading a measure with the gods."

She's heard that voice before from behind a different door. "You knew it was a trap?"

"Not a trap, never a trap. What a word that is. A gift, as I've said, for the pitia—"

It cuts off with a shriek when Asuna rams her boot into the door. "What gratitude is this? Has the moon addled what little wit you had?"

Asuna looks the door over. It didn't so much as budge when she hit it. She swings her axe at the window, drawing another yelp and then a laugh when it glances off the surface; the pane shivers at the impact, but when she inspects the glass she can't find a scratch.

She puts her gun to the opening and fires—

Her finger slips on the trigger as her hand spasms. The gun hits the wall and bounces to the ground.

She doesn't pick it back up immediately. She tests each joint on her hand, rubs her fingers together to judge the friction of the glove. She tries again, and again the gun flies from her hold. Using her other hand doesn't change the results. She shoots at the distant ceiling, the door on the other side of the hall, her feet; everything responds normally. She shatters a vial over her boots, letting the blood soak into the wounds, then lights and throws a Molotov.

The bottle explodes into flames and shards on the pillar behind her. The unseen madman doesn't stop laughing; it apparently doesn't need to breathe.

She can't harm the door, and she can't harm what's past it. She bounces a pebble in her palm, then tosses it with as little force as she can get away with. She hears it land on the floor on the other side.

The laughter breaks off. "Are you mad or just that bloody persistent? Don't you have a task to attend to? _Go_ already!"

Whatever defense is on the door, would it stop her from taking apart the wall? If she had a cannon— but that's wishful thinking. Maybe it judges what to block through the force applied. She tries another Molotov, this time actually sliding it through the gap. The bottle scrapes the side of the opening: her hand is trying to push it farther aside to stop it from making it through. So she lets go, and gravity does the work she can't. It tips to the other side.

A thin, black limb covered in bristles flashes up and catches it before it smashes on the floor. "No, none of that." The voice retreats from the door, accompanied by a steady pattern of taps and rustles. A splash of water and the dying hiss of a flame.

She goes to the other side of the hall and tries to shoot it again. Her aim starts to go wide, but she pins her arm between her ribs and a pillar to keep it in place. She manages to pull the trigger on the fourth attempt. Most of the scattershot impacts the walls or the door, and what little makes it through draws no response from the madman.

She dislikes leaving it like this, but she isn't getting through that door. The cavernous hall has her on edge. With no other beasts here, she doesn't have any more reason to stay.

She can't leave either, though: the lamp locations on the headstones in the dream have been scraped clean, the messengers gone from their bases. The only one remaining is at the top of the stairs, a broken headstone with a dark red core that leads to the lamp she just left behind. The messengers in their tree stump are withdrawn.

She's never encountered anything before that could affect the dream. She never even considered the idea that it could happen.

Gehrman is asleep in the garden. She's about to leave him when he starts speaking. He mumbles in his sleep often, but this is the first she's heard in the way of coherent words. She hesitates on the path. She shouldn't eavesdrop on him, but from his tone... it might be a nightmare. She moves closer, steps light.

"Oh, Laurence... what's taking you so long..."

She nudges him awake. He presses a hand to his wrinkled face, rubbing his forehead, then, with a sigh, lets it come back to rest on his cane. He looks up. "Asuna. Was there..." He trails off. "You've found Byrgenwerth's lecture building. How did that come to pass?"

He listens as she explains. When she's done, he says, "You trusted... Patches. The Spider. For good or ill, a mistake rarely made twice. The lecture building was subsumed into a nightmare around the time the Healing Church barred its doors. Find the host of the nightmare to break its hold on this hunter's dream."

"How did I die?" Bringing it up makes her head throb. She presses her eyes shut.

"Do you recall what I said to you when you asked me about Insight?"

"Don't think about it too hard."

"Yes, that's it," says Gehrman, and shoos her off.

She has enough echoes for a few levels. She followed through on what Argo's partner mentioned (the channeling, not the murder) and asked the doll about it. The doll, it turns out, can use echoes to directly strengthen a hunter's body. Each level increases general ability while at the same time letting the hunter focus more on a particular aspect. Increasing vitality makes one harder to injure, endurance lessens pain, strength is self-explanatory as well as increasing movement speed as an effect of making the legs more powerful, skill gives one more direct control over their movements and body, bloodtinge makes blood caustic, and Asuna isn't sure what arcane does beyond making flames burn hotter and for longer around her. She's invested all of her levels so far in strength and arcane and doesn't know of any compelling reasons to deviate from that.

The other doors that lead off the hallway are normal. The first one she tries is locked, but she kicks it down without much effort. Behind it is a lecture theatre. The openness still doesn't sit well with her even though it's not half the size of the hallway. Neither do the slime monsters in graduation caps and gowns that are the source of the sloshing sound, but these at least she can burn.

She cleans up the other lecture theatre and some storage rooms. In one chest, she finds a large slug-like creature. There's a bit in its description about an eldritch Truth, with a capital T, and Great Ones. It's probably not important. A bit of testing reveals that feeding the creature her blood prompts it to create a portal that summons large tentacles, which evidently belong to someone named Ebrietas. The tentacles don't carry much force, but they're unyielding enough to shove away everything in their path and sharp enough at the ends to draw blood.

Another chest contains what to all appearances is a human fetus, shimmers of heat rising from its bloodied form. Despite the body heat, it's unquestionably dead. She picks it up and lets her inventory take it. The description tells her it isn't a human and that it can be used for something called a Holy Chalice ritual, which, human or not, seems morally dubious. Would it have been stillborn originally, or did someone make it so in order to use it to power a ritual?

She finds what looks like a chemistry lab, except instead of chemicals it's mainly stocked with different types of blood. Most of them have coagulated or gone vile, while several just hit her as indefinably wrong. Some seem interesting. She rolls up a sleeve, cuts her arm, and pours out a third of one vial. Her flesh steams and her skin knits back together. A grey, stale-smelling shadow marks the healed injury. It occurs to her that college chemistry experiments probably aren't the safest things to play around with, particularly where there's blood involved. She starts to put the vial back, but grips it much harder than she intended and breaks it instead.

Returning to the dream fixes the issue. She buries the fetus in the garden, then heads back to the lecture building and the set of large doors at the end of the hall.

She opens them to a complete void. The newfound knowledge that things exist which can disrupt the dream gives her pause, but it's the only way she hasn't explored yet. She can't hesitate.

* * *

Asuna's current stats: Noble Scion - level (27), vitality (7), endurance (8), strength (24), skill (13), bloodtinge (14), arcane (21). Players began at level one with the standard starting stats of their class. Classes were assigned automatically with Waste of Skin not existing as an option. Level caps at 95 and individual stats at 99.


	9. Hemwick Charnel Lane: Morte

AN: Seki is Kibaou's (non-canon) real name.

3/6: Changed a few motivations that didn't make sense, reorganized some information that wasn't ordered very logically. Hopefully it's less confusing now.

* * *

With a large portion of the front-liners stuck in an area with an apparently unbeatable boss, wait times for the bells are longer than usual. Some of those hunters, Morte's sure, genuinely fell for the trap, but a good portion must have tripped it intentionally just to see what would happen and to pick up any extra items and levels hidden that way.

Completionists, over-achievers, and fools. All the more power to them. If they want to make this game last longer than it needs to, Morte is the last one to complain. There isn't likely going to be another VR game anytime soon, not after this debacle. He intends to milk the experience for all it's worth while he can.

He does wish Kayaba didn't change it so much from the beta. The bizarrely dynamic NPCs are interesting, but the rest—the pain; all the goddamn blood everywhere; forcing them to buy the multiplayer items instead of handing them out in the beginning; the real damage and movement in place of health bars, stamina bars, and automatically guided attack patterns—those are all things he could easily do without. Even co-op's a tricky business now: if one hunter spends enough time with another, their worlds will merge, as the Rat and her bodyguard found out the hard way. In retrospect, it makes sense. With very few exceptions, the NPC hunters all come in pairs, and it seems to be part of the lore that hunters generally find a partner to work with for life. Just because it's a part of the game's lore doesn't mean it should apply to the _players_ , though. Kayaba went way overboard with the immersion.

The whole "no logging out" bit, on that other hand—that, he has no problem with. He might be the one player who doesn't. The thought makes him grin.

Oh, Yharnam and its associated locales are objectively shitty places, there's no dancing around that. Any place that hurts dogs is horrible by default. Morte tries not to kill the dogs, just injures them enough to toss them into cages before healing them up, but fighting without intent to kill is a handicap he can't always afford. People and rats he doesn't mind; those are staples of video games. Was it really necessary to drag dogs into this mess, though?

(He goes to Central Yharnam regularly to feed the ones he's managed to save. After however long it's been, they still don't recognize him. It— hurts, to hear the impact of bodies against bars, the pained whines and exhausted growls, the teeth breaking against metal and the slaver falling to coat the floors.)

Even with that ugliness, though, Yharnam is beautiful. The moon painting the bridges and outer walkways liquid silver, the arches and spires and towers that fill the skyline with texture, the subtle shifts in gradient across each individual cobblestone and strand of mortar, the play of light and shadow that dances about the torches and bonfires, the weathered inscriptions on the headstones and the dark stains in the wooden coffins, the refractions in the water in the sewers, the shine of his weapons and the threads of the cloth in his armor, the loving care put into the stitching and color of the doll's clothing, the velvet flower petals and leaves bending just so when the breeze blows faintly, the ripple of fur and gleam of feathers and the frenzied movements of a beast that's scented moonlight.

He's making up for not being able to appreciate any of it in the beta. Most of the beta, for him, was spent simply learning what the hell _depth_ and _outline_ and _color_ are. He's being sentimental, but he likes to imagine Ririka can see through him now, that he's repaying her for letting him use her eyes for longer than he can remember.

He can't stay in the city forever. Their bodies in the waking world have to be on life support, which isn't sustainable indefinitely. He doesn't know the exact time limit, but it can't be too much more than a year, maybe two, and that's only if the people on the outside don't figure out how to end the hunt before then. He's going to remain here for as long as he can, though, and since he can't end the hunt alone when it comes time to leave, it means everyone else is staying right here alongside him. If that takes a bit of misdirection here, some lies there, to keep the others divided enough to stall their progress, well, that's just how things are sometimes.

He cocks his head as the chime of another bell reaches his ears. He rises to a standing position in time for his boots to land softly on dirt.

"About time," he says, turning around—

Stop. He recognizes that smell, even beneath the protective layer of ash and smoke that's grown over it.

He can't look. It takes everything he has already not to break down cackling like some Disney villain; he won't be able to stop himself if he looks. He clamps his teeth together, hunching over slightly, chest shuddering with the effort of keeping his breaths contained. A hurried silencing blank later, he's sitting back on the branch, high enough up that any riflemen he might have missed can't shoot at him and the ground and graves are hazy through the mists far below. He lets the laughter rush out, pounding his fist against the tree trunk.

Ryoutarou the Heretic, the public face of the Powder Keg covenant, a true pacifist in a city mired in the stench of blood and beasts, and an impassioned hater of beta testers. And, not that anyone knows it, Morte's creation. The man's a work of art, he is, and— god, but Morte just can't stop _laughing_. He calms down, still breathing heavily, to wipe the tears from his face. Unbidden, the memory of the Powder Keg's expression during their first meeting rises to his thoughts. He loses control again.

The beta testers have a good reason for not helping the new hunters and those who don't have bells yet. It's possible to set general messages around the place for other hunters to read, but those messages only exist in a few worlds at a time and can't be read by everyone who needs the information and support. To ensure that someone receives a message, it's necessary to know their name. Beta testers and new players came from different circles when they arrived in Yharnam, and many of the new players simply came in alone; nobody _knows_ their names to send them advice. Once a new player buys their bells, they're included quickly into the loop, but they have to make their own ways until then.

Morte was the first beta tester, as well as the first hunter from a different world, that Ryoutarou ever met. He should have been the one to explain that reason to him. But he wasn't, and he didn't, and now Ryoutarou's under the impression that all beta testers are selfish bastards with not a shred of goodness in their hearts. The few exceptions only serve to prove the rule. He's spread his view around, becoming the leader in all but name of the first faction of new players with an imaginary grudge against beta testers.

The Rat came as close to throwing a fit as Morte's ever heard when she found out what happened to turn Ryoutarou, who's by all accounts a surprisingly nice guy, into someone who could earn the epithet of Heretic. She wrote a pamphlet detailing how to act during first contact, what answers to give to common questions, and sent it to everyone, beta tester or not, who had a bell. Morte got one too. He can't read it, but he assumes it's effective enough: he doesn't know anything about a third faction springing up, and a few members of the second converted back to the light after getting it.

Right now, enough hunters are wrapped up dealing with the trap boss that a good portion of those remaining in Yharnam hate beta testers. Most of that number aren't Ryoutarou's. Ryoutarou's group is close-knit, with no more than a dozen members. The second faction of new players, spearheaded by Seki the Rolling Thunder (people Argo doesn't care for don't get very flattering nicknames), has nearly forty. That's not a small percentage—at last count, there were a total of three hundred hunters with bells. Unlike Ryoutarou, Seki advocates actually acting on their hatred, and has a wider appeal as a result.

Morte doesn't think he needs help for the Hemwick witches, who are apparently something of a joke aside from being really disgusting to kill, but the woods after the Byrgenwerth password gate, from what he's seen of them, are a massive pain that he has no desire to work through on his own. Since he doubts he's the only one with that view and the pool of willing cooperators is as low as it's been in a while, that means the hunt is going to be slow until someone figures out a strategy for the trap boss and the lost hunters can return to Yharnam.

If all goes well, it'll be a while before they manage it. They will, of course; Morte has faith in his fellow hunters. There are big names on the case—the Gunslinger Knight, Argo the Rat, the Pyromancer, the Blue Swordsman, the invaders That Poison Bastard and Darth Gun (invaders don't get very flattering nicknames either), among others. They'll work it out. But he won't be unhappy if it takes them half the night.

Actually, since he has time... He rings his sinister resonant bell. He's run into Ryoutarou twice. Why not a third time? The chances are as high now as they'll ever be.

Kayaba's done his best to stop PvP from ruining a defender's hunt. Invaders can choose the time of a battle, deliberately picking a fight when they're at their best and their opponent likely isn't, but the back-up that defenders can summon more than evens out the field. Besides that, invaders have a time limit to stop them from camping indefinitely in a defender's world, and they can't affect the world they're intruding on too much. So they can't, say, murder a defender's refugees or steal their loot or draw rude graffiti all over their city.

In a rare attack of conscience, Kayaba also thought to look after the invaders' safety. Invaders honestly need more protection than defenders. Unless it's one of Seki's attacking a beta tester, to be recognized as an invader is to be blacklisted from co-op and become free game for anyone who wants to try their luck. Even people who usually only ever fight beasts and madmen will actively help to hunt down known invaders. So to hide their identities, invading hunters are colored entirely dark grey with only black and lighter grey used to show depth through lighting, no sound they make is audible, and their scent is masked beneath the smell of the dream. A hunter can invade another, then hunt co-op with that same person a few minutes later without the erstwhile defender being any the wiser. It's still possible to identify them by their weapons, their armors, their fighting styles, their movements, but the more practiced invaders have different sets and move differently for PvP and co-op.

Safeguards or no, though, it's not worth the risk. Even if invaders weren't universally despised, Morte wouldn't know why anyone does it at all. To pick on the weak? A person's just as likely to roll up the Pyromancer as they are someone ringing a bell for the first time. If it's only for a good fight, mad hunters offer as much of if not more of a challenge. If death was permanent or equipment was lootable off other players, he could maybe see it, but as it is, physical damage just resets and dead hunters fade too quickly to steal their things. Morte's only ringing his sinister bell now to needle Ryoutarou.

The bell finally gets a response, but not from anyone he actually cares about. He shrugs and fires off a blank before the local hunter's thrown bottle of numbing mist can hit him. Going after Ryoutarou was just a passing thought. He doesn't mind killing some witches instead.


	10. Nightmare Frontier

AN: There are probably going to be more chapters from different perspectives after Amygdala. Asuna covers the Bloodborne side of things well enough, but she's a bit lacking on the interpersonal front from the other half of the crossover.

* * *

Like with the lecture building, it feels like she's returning to the dream. Asuna arrives in a small cave with a lamp. The sun hasn't set yet. Its light is paler than she remembers and leaves the craggy stones and scattered headstones washed out of color.

She pokes at the slug clinging to the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Ebrietas's augur pokes back. The creature doesn't seem unhappy with its new residence, though Asuna is still getting used to swallowing slime with her saliva. It opens its portals a few inches in front of itself regardless of line of sight, so keeping it there leaves her hands free without handicapping it.

And, to be honest, she misses eating and taste more than she would have expected. The augur isn't food, but it is a taste that isn't her own mouth.

There's a sinister resonant bell chiming somewhere a ways off. She puts it aside for the moment to deal with the immediate threats. Unlike the beasts of Yharnam, whose anatomy can be counted on to be of animal origin, the monsters here don't even have that much. The first beast she encounters has its head attached to its neck sideways; the toothy, gaping mouth is a vertical slash down the center of its face. It walks on two legs, although it falls to four to lunge, and carries a torch that it uses to send waves of flame forward, which is a neat trick. It curls up and sends electricity arcing from its fur when she makes it close. Not expecting it, she doesn't back away in time, and a bolt strikes her full in the chest, sending her to the cracked ground. Her body doesn't want to respond to her, shuddering from the voltage coursing through it, but she claws her way to her feet and caves in the beast's skull with her axe before it stands.

Aside from them, there are neckless beasts that lob boulders from atop ledges and larger, hard-hitting versions of the amalgamations of corpses that always carry blood stones inside them. She finds a pair of hunters and, after preparing a Molotov, hails them. They attack her wordlessly, the one with the blunderbuss and threaded cane covering for the axe-wielder. The axe-wielder rolls away from the cocktail and shakes droplets of burning oil off its cloak. It's no graveyard beast, but its partner keeps forcing her back before she can capitalize on any of its frequent openings. She lures it behind a large headstone, away from the protection of the gun, then goes after its partner once it's dead. That one takes a few tries; she doesn't have much experience against whips.

A gunshot signals the presence of a third hunter. She ducks behind a boulder, spending a vial on the injuries left over from the other two. She puts her head out of cover for a moment. The enemy is sharing space with a rock-thrower down the trail. Unlike normal madmen, hunters don't cooperate with anything aside from their partner if they have one, a rule she's only found two exceptions to. Invaders can't influence anything other than dreaming hunters, though, so they treat beasts as pieces of the environment, just as this one as is using the rock-thrower as a defense and distraction.

From the shield it's hunkered behind, it's a Knight of the Blood Oath. She's killed members of the covenant before (the graveyard beast, she's come to discover, was an anomaly; she's yet to find another mad hunter that can put up as much of a fight) and assisted others, and she… doesn't understand. They drink blood to strengthen themselves in battle, willingly allowing the scourge hold over them. Many don't fight like hunters, giving up their mobility and speed in exchange for the ability to attack from behind a slab of metal, and, for some, there's a predictability to their movements and an odd gleam about their eyes. It's not a wonder when they go mad.

Heathcliff being their leader explains some of it. He makes no distinction between madness and sanity as long as outward appearance hasn't changed. Hunters follow him because his method offers them power, but she doesn't understand how they can ignore the cost.

The Knight's shield takes the brunt of her scattershot round. The rest catches the rock-thrower, alerting it to her position without injuring it in any meaningful way. It hefts a boulder, but before it can toss it Asuna's Molotov hits the ledge, shooting glass and oil into its feet. It earns her a bullet in her throwing arm, but the beast falls to its knees, dropping the rock, which cracks into fragments and dust when it lands on the ground beneath the ledge.

The boulders the rock-throwers use break unusually easily. Whatever they're composed of, the majority isn't stone. She didn't give the oddity any thought up until she found out the hard way that the things are actually flammable—a rock-thrower tossed one at her while she was fighting a torch-wielding beast, and though she dodged the attack itself, the resulting dust cloud ignited in an explosion with both the beast and her caught inside.

Being on other side of that discovery is less painful. Her second Molotov arcs through the air. The instant it touches the dust, embers spread like lightning through a storm. The dark shape of the mad hunter has just begun to move when the orange glow blossoms into fire and heat.

The flare disperses into threads of smoke. The beast stumbles off the ledge to hit the canyon floor several stories below. The hunter is fumbling for a blood vial. It changes its mind while Asuna still has half the distance between them to cover and fires a silencing blank instead, fading away before she reaches it.

She gets another Knight invader. This one drinks two vials of blood as soon it appears, then tries to force a close-range fight with its massive greatsword. She keeps it at bay with her gun until she runs out of bullets, then, instead of wasting time reloading, she switches to a two-handed grip on her axe and extends its handle.

The enemy throws a bottle of hazy blue liquid at her, and she quickly backs away; she throws enough bottles of her own that she wants to be nowhere near its landing point, whatever it is. On contact with air, the liquid starts producing a lingering, sterile-smelling mist. The hunter skirts around it, running a sheet of paper along the flat of its blade. Crackling blue sparks skid across the greatsword. Unlike the invader itself, the hunter's equipment is audible.

A sheet of fire paper sets Asuna's axe alight. The messengers started selling the material to her once she picked up the hunter badge in the tower beside Oedon Chapel, so she's no longer wary of running out after using up Alfred's gift. It makes killing hunters much easier. The flame is hot enough to partially cauterize, handicapping their ability to heal from the blood they cut out of her. If they're going to close a wound properly, they'll have to take the time to use a vial.

She dodges its downward swing, backsteps from the second and third strikes it transitions quickly into. It leaps forward, and Asuna rolls away before its blade splits the stony ground. She catches it with her axe, the edge cutting through its boot and scraping its ankle bone before it puts distance between them. It throws itself at her again without an instant of hesitation, and again she slips to the side and breaks through its skin before it backs off.

It's strong enough to chop her in half if she lets it land a good hit. With a glancing blow, the electricity will at least numb the limb it touches. But that's only if she lets it, if she makes a mistake. Again and again it leaps and strikes, with every effort missing and earning a deeper slash from her axe as she gets better at timing her movements.

She nearly snags the artery in its wrist, and suddenly it breaks pattern. It lets go of its sword and tackles her. She's too close and it's too fast to dodge. She falls on her side, in the same motion shortening her axe's handle to swing it at the hunter clinging to her legs with one hand while the other works to push her back to her feet.

It catches the inside of her arm, interrupting the attack, and forces it to the ground. She tries to kick it off, but it pushes her down and sits on her ribs where her legs can't reach it. It starts beating at her hand, but she'll carve out her own eyes before she lets a beast disarm her again. After a few more hits, it gives up and simply presses its elbow into her arm to keep her from bringing her weapon up. Its other hand grabs for her throat; she catches it, her fingers clawing uselessly at the back of its glove and her muscles trembling as it presses inexorably down.

She bites her tongue. Ebrietas's tentacles surge out of the portal that opens in front of her face, throwing the mad hunter off her.

She rolls to her feet as the tentacles retract back into the closing portal. The enemy reaches for one of the blood vials at its waist, and while it's healing itself Asuna props her axe against her shoulder and brings out a Molotov.

It picks up the weapon it dropped and wrenches the sword out of the massive bladed sheath it's been swinging around. Then, instead of charging her, it fishes out another vial and knocks the contents down its throat. Asuna snorts derisively and makes to toss the Molotov.

The enemy throws the vial to the ground, shattering it completely, and sprints around to hit her from the side. Asuna grasps the bottle by the tips of her fingers before it leaves her hand and redirects the throw into the mad hunter's path. The thing moves to avoid it, faster now with the sheath on its back instead of throwing off its balance, so the cocktail takes it on the shoulder instead of full in the chest. Its armor takes most of the glass, but its head is unprotected. It stumbles, pressing its off hand to the burning remains of its cheek and neck, and simply stands there, hunched over with its breaths coming in short, shallow spurts. When it hacks out a cough, there are red flecks in the saliva.

Her axe is cold, but no less sharp for it. She darts forwards, and her blade eats down through its collarbone to rip apart its heart.

She spends some time searching for the madwoman ringing the bell, but it never stays in one place and she isn't a good enough tracker to keep following it. Eventually, she decides to leave it be. It's better this way. Every mad hunter summoned into her world is another mad hunter not summoned into the world of someone who might not be able to kill them.

A shallow, putrid bog lies at the bottom of the canyon. She stays away from the muck's edge and the pale, rotting, squid-like things lying in the water, and finds a trail that leads up the side of the canyon, following it out of the bog. She hears slurping and heavy steps and checks around the corner

There's something on the trail ahead. Before she can process what she's looking at, the thing turns around and sees her.

That— that can't be right. It can't be wearing the doll's clothes, reaching the doll's porcelain hands towards her. Those can't be messengers fused together in that bulbous mass of its head, their eyes stretched round and far, far too large. It's— why is it— why is it singing, why is it coming towards her, why does it— how does it—

Its blood is dark. The— body—is it a body? The thing falls off the path, out of sight. The memory of it, every contour and detail, presses crystal-sharp against her thoughts, into her thoughts; the off-tune hum burrows into her ears, her eardrums, her brain, and draws—

—blood, her own blood, turning against her, impaling her from the inside.

"Good hunter?"

Asuna sees the doll's face, every detailed brushstroke and elaborate mechanism, the strands of silver hair that hang loose from her dark bonnet. The doll kneels in front of her, hands settled on her lap. "Good hunter. Can you hear me?" Her voice is soft and accented and familiar. She glances at the messengers at her side. "Please, would you find Gehrman?"

At some point, she returns to perch on the edge of her overgrown ledge near the lower fountain. Asuna watches her.

Gehrman's wheelchair creaks on the path. "Asuna." She looks up at her name. He leans forward and peers into her eyes. He straightens. "In the cupboard beside the bookshelf, behind the blood vials, there are four small bottles, stained yellow, with a clear liquid inside. Bring one here."

The messengers return bearing a bandage-wrapped bottle. Gehrman uncorks it, pulls down Asuna's mask, and opens her mouth.

"Isn't that—" A smile creases his face. "Well. There's one way to do it."

He pours half the contents past her lips. "Swallow." She does. He pours in the rest, tells her to swallow again, and passes the empty bottle to the messengers.

"I've heard hunters call them winter lanterns. They're only found in nightmares. I don't have experience with them myself, but your predecessors' usual strategy has been to strike quickly from behind."

Her heart beats a light staccato. There's cold sweat on her palms and the nape of her neck. She forces herself to breathe at a normal pace. "Makes sense," she mumbles past the augur. She very deliberately steers herself away from picturing the winter lantern, pushing it into the same sealed-off corner of her mind as Insight and the shrouded church. If something is crippling to think about, then don't think about it. Sound advice.

She takes the augur out. It raises the front half of its body off her palm and looks around, eye stalks bobbing. "That stuff you gave me. Do you have any more?" Where there's one enemy, there's usually more. She's... not keen to experience that effect again.

"Take the rest of the supply if you feel you need it. There isn't much left, but it should serve you through this nightmare," he says. "If it isn't enough, I can make more with the materials. Although, you wouldn't be able to use it for a while. It takes some time to steep."

She takes two of the three remaining bottles. It's a sedative; not what she expected, but it makes sense. It did calm her down.

Then it's back to the nightmare frontier. She retraces her steps, cuts down an invader long before the slow-acting poison it uses can kick in, and plows onward through new territory that's no different from the old.

She reaches an opening in the stone. The frame is clearly carved. Past it is a clearing walled in by crags, with patches of tall grass and odd totems sticking up haphazardly. There's a tower across from the entrance, only keeping upright by leaning against the clearing's walls. The doorway and windows are dark and still. The host is likely there. She hasn't seen another building in the nightmare.

What is the host? She glances back, at the sun and the rock and the corpses of beasts. Something made and is sustaining all of it. If the host is mad, if she has to put it down, it might take a few tries to manage.

If a nightmare's nothing more than a dream perverted from its purpose, does the hunter's dream have a host too? The passing thought is interesting enough that she considers it for a moment before setting it aside. Something to wonder about later, after she's found the source of the nightmare.

The air seems thicker as she nears the tower. It's nothing tangible, her movements aren't affected, but… it seems thicker. There's a yellow tint independent of the sunlight. It shimmers faintly near the top of the tower, the light bending around the outline of a hand, an arm….

The host of the nightmare pushes off from the tower. The ground quakes at its impact. It shakes itself out, letting its bones swing in ways that nearly hurt to look at, then tilts the head that should be far too large for the comparatively thin neck to support. She can't tell what it's looking at—its head is a featureless porous oval with long, stiff bristles scattered between the crevices.

Then its eyeballs, hundreds of them, fall to dangle in clusters out of the holes in its head. After a moment, they're reeled back inside. A low growl rumbles, sounding from its entire skeletal body.

Her hands tighten on her weapons, but it doesn't move. She doesn't think it's paying attention to her.

Then it braces its front fists on the ground. The growl cuts off as its eyes tumble out.

What she can only describe as orange laser beams slice across the wall by the suddenly foggy entrance. In the brief instant before they hit, she catches the silhouette of an invader, and then it's lost in a storm of light.

Asuna stares wide-eyed at the host. A series of explosions jerks her attention back to the target of the attack in time to see fires blossom and rock blow apart along the paths the lasers cut. There's not even a bloodstain to mark the location of the invader.

The host turns its head to Asuna. With a roar that shakes the ground, it raises all three pairs of skeletal arms, light twisting and darkening in front of its splayed hands.


	11. Amygdala

She dies nine times before she realizes this isn't working. The host is such an out of context problem that she doesn't have any tactics ready for dealing with it. Everything she's fought up until now has made physical sense. Their anatomy, no matter how distorted, still comes from an animal base, and their weapons fit their forms, be they claw or fang or tool.

Meanwhile, the host has arms on its back and laser-spewing eyes stored inside its skull. What is she supposed to target? The torso, that solid wall of bone? The legs that are each twice her size? The arms too high up to hit? The head, an inexhaustible fount of acidic eyeball juice and explosive laser beams? The glowing cavity in its chest seems like a good bet, but it's a small target that she can't find a way to reach before she's killed.

"Is there a host of the dream?" she asks Gehrman.

"What brought this up?"

She explains. If the dream has a host, it might give her a point of reference for defeating its mad counterpart.

After a pause, he says, "I'm not the one you should ask."

It takes a moment to understand why that response throws her off. She can't remember Gehrman ever mentioning the doll, even so obliquely, outside of that first time Asuna found him in the workshop, when she woke up in a clinic in Central Yharnam frightened and foreign and ignorant.

Thinking on it, she doesn't know that they've ever spoken, or even come within sight of each other. Gehrman came to the gate of the dream a single time, but he never once glanced in the doll's direction while there.

For Asuna, a hunter mired in her work, the calm of the dream is its own peace. If she had to stay, though, to wait out the long night here ( _all the long nights_ , and she feels the quiet presences of the graves amongst the flowers), she doesn't know that she could appreciate it as she does. She doesn't think Gehrman spends half his time sleeping because he needs to. The doll can understand and converse with the messengers, but for him, it seems like two people would pass the time more quickly than one. If they honestly have nothing at all to talk about, there's always... tic-tac-toe. Something. That they don't interact at all is odd.

The doll gives her an answer about the host. "The moon presence."

Asuna follows her gaze to the light hanging low and radiant in the sky. "A kami?"

"I've never heard that word before," says the doll, looking back to her.

"It's a spirit. I guess... it'd be alive, but not physically. Not the way a human is."

"That's very accurate." She sounds surprised. Though her face is wood and porcelain and metal, smooth and unchanging, her voice sometimes carries faint inflections. "Are they well known in your homeland?"

"I don't think they exist back home," says Asuna. "But the myths are common knowledge."

"If... it does not inconvenience you, good hunter, would you tell me about your homeland sometime? Not now, of course, if it doesn't suit you, but, should you ever wish to, and find the time."

Time doesn't matter. She's not sure why the doll is asking, but if she's interested, it doesn't hurt to talk about it. "What do you want to know?"

Actually, the doll doesn't ever leave the dream, does she? Her knowledge of Yharnam is secondhand from the messengers and the hunters she's tended to. They're her only connection to the waking world. Yet her latest charge hasn't spoken to her that often.

It's something to change. The doll's done a lot for her; the least she can do is repay her with information.

The doll doesn't have any specific requests, so Asuna starts broad. "The city I lived in was called Tokyo..."

At some point, messengers start to come by, and the doll takes the augur from Asuna and sits down on her ledge, setting the slug in the grass beside her. Asuna paces. She switches topics without a clear connection to what she was talking about before. More than once she backtracks or repeats a sentence or trails off into silence to collect her thoughts. She dregs up memories she didn't know she still had, from school and home and the city and abroad and places she doesn't remember. The doll occasionally uses a break in the narrative to translate a question from the messengers about where locations are in reference to each other, but for the most part her audience simply listens.

She didn't realize there was so much she could say. With every word she speaks, she remembers: there's going to be something afterwards. At the end of the night, the moon will set, the hunt will end, and Asuna... will she return to Japan? Will Yharnam have been nothing more than a bad dream, a memory to move on from and let fade over the years?

No, she'll never again not be a hunter. It may not have been willing at first, the messengers might have chosen her without any of her input, but there's no turning back now. The hunt's on tonight, and a hunter must hunt. She's needed. The trail of corpses that marks her growth is a testament to her role.

What will she be, then, when her purpose is spent? What's a dreamer without a dream?

She's getting ahead of herself. ( _Don't think about it too hard._ ) For now, there's work to do.

She has the beginning of a plan when she heads out again the nightmare. If the host is a kami, then it should be linked to something, a place or object or concept or greater force. Granted, she doesn't know exactly what that would be, but it's invested enough of itself in the nightmare that the twisted place must figure into it somewhere.

She heads to where the nearest rock-thrower was. A wide, uneven crater paler than the surrounding mineral marks the source of its boulders. It's impossible to tell how deep the vein goes, but she's yet to see a rock-thrower run out of ammunition or move to a different source.

She lights a match against the soft rock. She watches over the flames until they eat away the surface layer and settle into a steady smolder. Then she moves on to the next one, sets the fire to burn.

By the end, she can taste ash through her mask with each breath. She returns to her end of the canyon and leans against the wall of the cave that houses the lamp. Smoke dusts the air with a grey patina.

 _Are we left no other choice, than to burn it all to cinder?_ Is this how it was when the hunters before her consigned Old Yharnam to flame? The last resort, used when they were sure there was not a single person left, and only hungry, twisted beasts prowled through what had once been a town renowned for its healing practice.

She wonders how many humans are left in Yharnam. She knows of Eileen, Alfred, Heathcliff, the caretaker of Oedon Chapel, Gascoigne's daughter... Just enough to count on one hand. Perhaps there are more. There must be more. When she makes it out of the nightmare, she'll search the town again. Her situational awareness outside of immediate threats is... lacking, she's quite aware. She wouldn't have noticed the spider had it not called to her from the window of a house not yet broken into. There might well be holdouts she missed.

In the distance, a patch of ground sinks. An overhang crumbles into the fetid water below. The evening sky thickens and darkens. She gets more invaders before a section of the canyon collapses and the madwoman's bell goes silent—though, strangely, the later ones escape without making any hostile moves.

The nightmare shudders.

A hand grasps the edge of the cliff. Asuna doesn't wait for it to climb out fully. She darts forwards, crossing the two dozen feet between them to crunch her axe into the bone of the host's skull as its head clears the edge.

She pulls back as it roars, dodging away from its scrabbling limbs as it pulls itself up onto level ground. Headstones crumble beneath its hands. She reaches for a Molotov, but breaks off in the face of a volley of lasers. She's faster than them now, but there's too many of them and too little room to maneuver with the host taking up most of the available flat ground. She barely makes it out before the rock starts blowing apart in delayed explosions.

The dust clouds from the explosions swallow what visibility remains. That's fine. There's only one direction to go.

Her axe thuds against the host's leg, and it must hit a place she weakened in an earlier attempt because the blade comes back wet. She starts to step away, but then the _scent_ hits her.

She reels, light-headed. Gravel scrapes as the host raises its foot, and she barely has enough presence of mind left to get out of the way before it can stomp on her. Her axe comes with her, towing the scent along. It's— as if the blood of every beast she's slain up to now was concentrated into a single cocktail.

The host grabs for her, a rush of displaced air the only warning. She ducks under its stunted tail, out of its reach, and gets in a few glancing, pointless blows on its ankles before it shifts it feet. It plants its hands on the ground and drops its head low, peering at her. Its eyeballs tumble out.

Her first instinct is to get out of the path of the inevitable laser, but she crushes it down and shoots forwards instead. Its head is the only part proven vulnerable, and this is the best chance she's had of reaching it. As the telltale glow lights up around its irises and heat begins to distort the air, her axe hits.

Its eyeballs retract so quickly she nearly misses the movement. It jerks its head upright; Asuna digs her heels into the ground and rips out her axe, drawing a spray of orange fluid from the wound, and then the heavy presence of the host overhead vanishes as it leaps away. It lands with a dull impact near— no, on top of the lantern cave.

Lasers. She dodges out of the way of one only to catch another full-on. It sears a line from her cheek down to her stomach before she spins out of the way, and by then it's already too late.

It's a good thing that it reached her head first. The explosion goes by quickly enough that she hardly has time to register the feeling of her skull flying apart. Then she's back in the dream, sprinting by the doll, up the stairs, to the gravestone with the bleeding core, reaching for the words that will take her back out—

It's blank.

She doesn't know what she'd do without the messengers and their never-faltering eagerness to aid her, but even they won't risk themselves for a reason as pointless as setting up a lantern at a location where they'll be in immediate danger. With the host's weight settled atop, it's not unlikely that the cave's already collapsed.

Hesitantly, she pulls her hand back. What now? She can go through the lecture hall, make her way back to the nightmare frontier from there, but the portal in the building leads directly into the cave.

It's worth a try, she supposes. She brushes her fingers over the inscription for the lecture building and makes her way down the massive hall. It's silent but for the rustle of her clothing and the emptiness that comes with any massive space left still for too long. The spider seems to have left.

A whiff of beast-scent brushes by. She darts into cover behind a pillar and extends her axe, but the openness of the building must be setting her off. There's nothing here but her.

She pulls open the doors at the end and finds herself up against a flat wall. The portal to the frontier is gone.

As she's returning to the lamp, she stops on a whim and heads for the chemistry lab instead. It hasn't changed since she left it, still painted over with dust and littered with glass shards from the vial she broke. She uncorks a container at random and waits for the smell to waft out.

Even looking for it, it's not easy to pick out. Not only is it faint, buried beneath a myriad of other materials and diluted nearly to impotence, but she's grown so used to its presence that it's difficult to force her mind to pay attention to it. It's certainly there, though: the scent of the host's blood.

She sets the lab's supply aside and brings out one of her own vials. Tainted and watered down by the scent of the beast she took it from, there's an undercurrent of a scent nearly identical. There's a hint of... it's difficult to put into words, but she imagines that if starlight had a smell, it would be something like this.

She stows it away, then pulls off her gloves and scratches the back of one hand with the other with enough force to break skin. Red wells up along the trails as she brings it up to her mask.

Hunters smell like moonlight. She has a better idea of why, now.

Not only moonlight. She sifts through the mundanities of iron and heat and rust and liquid. There's something past them, so thin that she nearly dismisses it before she remembers what she's searching for. All she can make out is that it's like the host, like the starlight. Both or neither, she's not sure.

She's not sure why she cares, either. She's just a hunter. The Church can keep their blood science. She pulls her gloves back on.

In the dream, she sits cross-legged on the low wall by the stairs. It's a constant, conscious effort to keep herself from shifting to a position that would be quicker to move from, but if she can't be safe in the dream, then she isn't safe anywhere.

She watches the only gravestone still with messengers at its base. One lantern that leads to an empty building. What now?

She must drift off at some point, because the next instant that she's aware, the gravestones have changed. The one connected to the nightmare remains as it was, but the others have words carved into their faces once more and messengers clustered around them. She blinks and straightens her back. Has the host died?

There's no way to check. The portal in the lecture building hasn't returned, and the messengers haven't relighted the lantern in the frontier.

She's never killed a beast so indirectly before. Not deliberately, at any rate—there must have been a good amount of collateral damage from what she did to the nightmare. But there's no other instance she can recall. It's a strange feeling. Dead is dead, regardless of method, and this was certainly much less trying than fighting it head-on, but...

Her palms itch, and she lets her right hand come to rest on her axe's handle. But. But what?

She rises and makes her way to the recently restored headstones. She pauses in front of the one that leads to the lamp in Oedon. She's forgetting something. What was it again... Ah, yes, she did promise to look for people.

Her feet touch the cobblestones of Central Yharnam. She tilts her head up to the moon high in the dark sky. The air hangs heavy with the scent of beasts and fire and blood. After the nightmare, it feels like coming home.


	12. Hunter's Dream: Lisbeth

AN: Rika is Lisbeth's real name.

So I watched some DLC boss fights recently, and, ah, that thing I said in an earlier AN about this being pre-DLC? Turns out I lied. Lady Maria might have displaced Eileen as my favorite BB character, plus I have plans now for Ludwig's sword. (Plans that Asuna will likely gleefully derail, but still.)

I realize this is a bit late, but— thank you, everyone who's taken the time to skim, read, watch, favorite, and/or review this story. It really does mean a lot to me. I take all of your feedback, suggestions, and criticism into account when I'm writing. If there's ever anything you wouldn't mind seeing more of, or if some part of the writing isn't working, or if you think I should clarify something, I'll see what I can do about it.

* * *

Rika used to spend a lot of time playing MMOs on her laptop in bed with a bag of chips and bottle of soda on the floor in easy reach.

It's a trite thought, but most people really do take so much for granted. The foundation of Maslow's hierarchy—adequate food, clean water, breathable air, a safe place to rest. She doesn't technically need any one of those anymore, but... it's not something she'll ever say aloud, but the biggest reason she wants out of the game isn't so she can see her family and friends or because she just really hates Yharnam. The first thing she's going to do when the night ends, the very first thing, is get a bowl of noodles and— drown herself in it. Just plant her face in the soup and die. Not literally, but... no, literally sounds fantastic. She's looking forward to it.

And then there are the other things, the things so little that no one takes them for granted because half the time people don't remember they're there _to_ take for granted.

The pendulum on the bookshelf falls on each swing as if traipsing through molasses and climbs the ascent like a man wheeling a chair up a muddy hill. The little gears and mismatched pieces scrape quietly against each other: _scree_ on the up, _eek_ on the down. A veritable little cleric beast, except this one doesn't leave a mess after its meals, so really it's about a quadrillion times better. Also similar to the cleric beast, it's completely useless as a clock. She named it Bishop Grand Failure, First of His Name, Bringer of Death and Destroyer of Hope.

The disparate pieces on the worktable in front of her belong to what's going to be Murderizer 3000. Or Evilbane Beastbiter, Drinker of Blood and Eater of Priceless, Worthless Time. Both? Mr. Murderizer isn't picky.

If she still slept, she could assemble a gun in her sleep by now. Trick weapons, on the other hand, are trickier. Well, most of them, but she can't rely on the simpler ones. The kirkhammer, beautiful monstrosity that it is, already wrecked any potential competition in the market for very large rocks on very sharp sticks.

Rika's forced to use designs that require slightly more than a week-old infant's finger dexterity and intelligence to put together. Beastbiter, for instance, is going to be a naginata-katana when she's done with him.

He's Rika's first original design, and the first weapon she's assembling without Gehrman's supervision. The mechanics of the switch are taken nearly wholesale from the hunter axe, and Gehrman streamlined all of the many clunky portions of the design when she showed him the blueprint to check over, but the idea was more or less hers, so she figures that makes it original.

Bloodborne has a knack for giving the player completely unbiased and factually accurate information that somehow doesn't answer any questions despite saying a lot. Learning that the trick weapons make physical sense was one of those moments.

For Kayaba to take a perfectly decent if kind of niche game, for him to take Yharnam, a city he put his heart and soul and decades of life into realizing, and ruin it with this damn _stunt_ of his—she doesn't understand it. The architecture is nice—not her aesthetic, but she understands that from a perfectly objective standpoint it's not bad at all—the atmosphere is as pervasive and unsettling as it's meant to be, the clothes are everything she didn't know she liked come together, the enemies would be just scary and challenging and fast-paced enough with the real pain taken out and some guided attack patterns for the players added in, the NPCs are lifelike to the point that she feels more comfortable treating them like real people, the graphics and sensations are utterly flawless, she hasn't come across a single bug (a miracle unto itself, that), and he _invented his own type of weapon_ for the game. Trick weapons wouldn't work too well in real life, admittedly, but that's because they need a player character's reflexes and strength to wield effectively, not because they're nonviable designs.

He built a masterpiece, and the moment he finished, he spat on it and threw it to the rats. As a fellow craftsman (is she being presumptuous, calling herself a craftsman without a single craft yet to her name?), it's... she imagines it would be like strangling a pet to death with your bare hands. Seeing the shock and confusion at the inexplicable betrayal, feeling the thrashing weaken over long minutes until the eyes glaze over, the muscles slacken, the rapid-fire pulse of the large veins in the throat stilling under your fingers. And then tossing the body into a dumpster behind a restaurant, just to stick a final nail in a coffin that already more resembles an iron maiden.

She stops a few times during her work to answer messages from some of the friends she's made in various MMOs. The four of them have a policy of checking in with each other often. If they can't think of anything interesting to say, then just drawing a silly picture or writing "How are you holding up?" is enough.

It's usually Rika who has to resort that. She doesn't have much to talk about aside from her project, and (her gaze darts over to the failed clock) she doesn't want to talk about it until she finishes.

At some point, she picks up the screwdriver again and then stops. Slowly, she sets it back on the table. There's nothing more to be added or adjusted.

She cradles the finished piece for a moment, relishing its weight in her arms, before moving the hilt to her hand. She swipes the katana, mostly because she thinks that's what she's supposed to do with it—she's never used a sword before and so has no idea if it's moving correctly. After a few tries, she figures that's enough and pulls out the handle to try the naginata form.

She had a naginata module in phys ed once in middle school. She remembers exactly none of it. She practices some quick jabs with the naginata anyway.

She was worried when she came up with the idea that it would be too similar to the axe. Gehrman brushed the concern aside easily the moment he saw the design; she knows why now.

The axe has a sort of brutal practicality. It's a weapon to kill beasts with. When the range is too short or firearms aren't doing much, you extend it and kill beasts with it. From experience, Rika remembers that using an axe amounts essentially to beating on an enemy until it stops moving. It's pretty similar to Hammertime's Hulk Smash form.

Her weapon is faster, more precise. The edge is honed as sharp as she could get away with while still keeping it sturdy. Its extended form is an entirely different weapon, unlike the axe, which just becomes a longer axe. A halberd, if she wants to get technical, which she doesn't.

And maybe this is just because it's the labor of her own hands, but she thinks it has a sense of _pride_ to it. At its base, an axe is a tool meant for felling trees, and it's never tried to forget that. The hunter axe is a blunt tool posing as a bladed weapon. A sword or a naginata, though—using one is an affirmation that your enemy is, or was, a person, and it's an affirmation that the wielder is a person. Any bulldozer can smash a tree down, but it takes a human to wield a blade, and it takes a flesh-and-blood opponent for a blade to be useful. It's not a feeling Hammertime's sword form can match, because at the end of the day even the kirkhammer's elegant blade was designed to have a giant brick capping the end.

One last thing to do, then. Rika grabs her top hat off the shelf and sets it lightly atop her short brown hair with as solemn an expression as she can manage, her back straight as a board. Then she grins, hefts the naginata over her shoulder, and heads out the back door along the path to the small clearing in the garden. "Gehrman-ojiisan! It's done!"

He takes the weapon from her, a smile smoothing his worn face. "I can see that. How do you feel?"

"Tell me if it works first, then I'll answer."

He doesn't try using it like she did. His gaze travels slowly along its length, starting down from the gleam of moonlight on the blade, and his hand follows, wrinkled fingers tracing lightly down the metal. When he reaches the end, he pushes the handle in with a strength that it doesn't look like his wiry old frame has. He holds out a hand and runs the flat of the blade along it until he find the balancing point; then he taps it against his leg, spends a long moment feeling the connection between the blade and the hilt, and extends and shortens it several times.

"The mechanism is tight," he says. "Pulled with force at the wrong angle..." He yanks on it sharply, and the handle comes to a sudden halt halfway out. He tugs on it again firmly, but it doesn't budge. He hands the jammed weapon out to her. "Will you fix it on your own?"

She hugs it against her chest. "I can do it by myself. But everything else—the balance, and everything—that's all right?"

He nods. "Well done."

It's a simple fix, one of the first things Gehrman taught her about weapon maintenance. When she's done, she takes her axe apart to compare. She puts them both back together, tests it to be sure, then heads back out.

"You wished to sell it?" Gehrman asks.

"Can I do that? I can't exactly mass produce these if it turns out that more than one person wants one, and— I mean, how _would_ I sell it? Can I put it up in the shop?"

"You can," says Gehrman. "Numbers are not an issue you should concern yourself with. Any other night, you would have needed the Church's or a workshop's backing to produce enough to sell, but... tonight is a different case..." One of his hands tightens on the wheelchair. His grip relaxes when the polished wood creaks, and he sighs faintly. "The dream will provide."

Another of those odd little moments: the NPCs have a way of tacitly acknowledging the fourth wall. Not that they realize they're a bunch of coding in a video game created by a lunatic, but they're generally aware that the lore and backstory have some significant differences from the actual gameplay. She's only really interacted much with Gehrman, Doll, and the messengers, so she doesn't know if it's every NPC that does it, but it's disconcerting even coming from only Gehrman and Doll.

As a test, she actually told Gehrman about the whole video game thing, about Bloodborne and the NerveGears and Kayaba Akihiko and the real world. He listened calmly through her whole explanation. When she finished, instead of protesting or having his AI bug out or trying to give some silly in-universe rationalization, he just said, "I knew."

Whatever that means.

A cluster of messengers sprouts like daisies from the grass, grasping for Rika. They're kind of cute, in their own way. She drops to a crouch and holds out a bare hand, letting their bony little palms rest against her fingers. Despite their corpse-like appearance, their skin is warm as a human's.

"Hello, I want to put this up for sale in the blood echo store."

A few of them bob their heads. The rest look at her expectantly.

"Name a price and how much of the profit you wish them to have," says Gehrman. "For comparison, the Church generally gives three percent."

She glances up at him, startled. "Three?" So, what, for every kirkhammer they sell they get ninety echoes? What can you even do with ninety echoes other than admire the pretty nine next to the big fat zero?

"Three percent is their minimum," Gehrman says, watching the messengers. "You can raise it if you find it makes you uncomfortable, though it makes no difference to them."

"Three thousand echoes," she says, the same price as the kirkhammer. She considers for a moment, and then goes on slowly, "Fifteen percent to you," because she's not a stingy bastard, "and thirty-five to Ojiisan."

She regrets it as soon as the words leave her mouth, because what was she thinking? Giving away a full half of her money to a bunch of numbers and letters with delusions of sapience?

But she can't exactly take it back. The messengers hug her fingers fondly and then sink back into the ground. Rika looks up to find Gehrman staring at her. For the first time since she's known him, he seems lost for words.

"What?" says Rika, covering over her screw-up with indignation. She can feel her cheeks heating up. "You're my teacher."

"What do you expect I would do with blood echoes?" says Gehrman. "Don't misunderstand—it was a kindly gesture, I thank you for it, but you have far more use for them."

"There has to be something you can use them for. Get a gold peg leg, buy some new clothes, take Doll on a date—"

That, as it turns out, is exactly the wrong thing to say. It's subtle, but Rika's rather good at picking up facial cues, if she says so herself, and she notices how his expression flattens a little and his eyes narrow slightly. She stops, bewildered. It was obviously a joke. Why—

Wait, did they break up? Are they exes? Did she dreg up bad memories? But they live together, so they have to get along, right? Plus Gehrman's like ninety and Doll looks like she's in her mid-twenties, so that's kind of— not what Rika wants to be thinking about.

And now she's thinking about it. And about the pile of books in the workshop with titles like _How To pick up fair Maidens_.

Um.

 _Um._

The messengers pop back bearing a note. She leaps for the lifeline.

 _Naginata Katana_

 _A trick weapon of the workshop. Created by the workshop hunter Rika, a foreigner to Yharnam._

"Is, ah, this the description?" At their nods, she asks, "I can change it, right?" More head bobbing.

She chews thoughtfully on her pen, considering whether she should make it something stupid and immersion-breaking to spite Kayaba. It's painfully tempting.

On the other hand, her weapon doesn't deserve that kind of treatment. Neither really does the game, which hasn't done anything wrong. A little disappointed, she starts writing a (mostly) lore-friendly, albeit slightly dramatic, description.

 _Akatsuki_

 _A trick weapon of the workshop. Created by a workshop hunter foreign to Yharnam._

 _The katana's hilt can be extended to transform the weapon into a naginata. Be creative._

 _No nightmare lasts forever. No nightmare torments without cause. Let the dawn's brilliant sun scorch the beast that corrupted this dream._


	13. Forbidden Woods: Silica

AN: Keiko is Silica's real name. Rose is not an OC, but almost none of her backstory in this fic is canon.

It's possible to write fake lore in an item description, but the messengers are the ones with the final say over what goes into their shop. If a description is misleading or untrue, they're not against sticking in a line at the end about foreigners having strange ideas about Yharnam's customs.

* * *

"I'm twelve, she's ten and a half, if you bring it up again I'm going to use this before you can even think about telling us to stay in the dream."

The beckoned hunter barely glances at the brandished silencing blank before nodding once. Since that's cleared up, Keiko smiles at them. Her mask blocks her mouth, but expressions come through the eyes and voice too. "I'm Keiko."

"My name is Rose," says Keiko's partner. "Thank you, for answering the bell."

Keiko and Rose look pretty similar. They're about the same height—although Keiko, despite being older, is actually the shorter one—and wearing the same set of standard hunter's armor bought from the bath messengers. Rose seems smaller, though, when they're not standing close enough to compare, and her voice is much softer. She speaks at a normal volume, but something about the quality just lets it blend into the background on certain sounds. And, of course, she's usually the one whose clothes are covered with blood, like now.

Neither of them carries weapons. They don't need to. The inventory system is the third- or fourth-largest advantage a dreaming hunter has over a woken one, and neither Rose nor Keiko is shy about making full use of it. They used to need to use the menu, and then they moved on to only needing to say out loud the name of the item they needed, but lately all they've had to do is think it. Keiko's pretty sure it's because the messengers, who manage the inventory by ferrying supplies to and from hunters on the job in much the same way they deliver messages, have grown more used to predicting their needs.

The beckoned hunter reaches for their mask, hooks their finger under the edge, then pauses. They let go of the mask as the other hand flicks through their inventory to pull out their notebook. _Asuna_ , they write. It looks like a girl's name. That's neat. All the people they've summoned so far have been guys.

All of them could talk, too. Keiko's never met someone who couldn't. But writing's not that distant from talking, and it's not like Asuna's hearing is an issue, so Keiko figures she doesn't need to act too differently. "Gehrman said that's the way to the Forbidden Woods," she says, pointing. Asuna half-turns to look up at the gate set into the towering wall. "We didn't want to go in there on our own when we don't know what to expect, so we summoned help. Have you already been there?"

Asuna shakes her head, still focused on the gate.

"The password, it's a spoken one," Rose says. "Is that why...?"

Asuna tugs off her left glove, pulls her mask down, opens her mouth, and reaches her fingers inside. Keiko and Rose stare at the pearly slug oozing saliva and slime across her palm. Its stubby eye stalks wave slowly. Asuna swallows audibly, then says, "I can speak, but it's an inconvenience."

"Oh," says Keiko faintly.

"Is that an augur?" Rose asks, stepping closer. The slug lifts what's probably its front half to meet her, which is unbelievably weird, and Keiko's watched beasts burst from the skins of men. "I've seen pictures."

"Yes."

"I'm... terribly sorry if this is impolite to ask, but... why do you keep it in your mouth?"

"It leaves my hands free."

"Oh... well... that makes sense," Rose says in the tone that means she doesn't understand but thinks asking any more will seem annoying.

"What's the password?" Asuna asks.

Password, right. Keiko knocks on the gate, waits for the response from the gatekeeper on the other side, and, once he prompts her, calls through the door, "Fear the old blood!"

The doors swing inwards with a grinding of gears, revealing a small, circular stone room filled with rubble and a dead guy with a dusty suit and top hat sitting on a collapsed pillar. There is no gatekeeper. Keiko snorts.

"Is that...," Rose begins, staring at the mostly decomposed corpse. She trails off.

"It's a night of the hunt," says Asuna.

Keiko nods. "Time doesn't matter the same way."

"How do you want to take this?" Asuna asks.

That settles it: she might be kind of weird, but Keiko's willing to give her the benefit of the doubt for now. Everyone they've summoned has said things like "Follow my lead, don't do anything stupid" or "Stay there and watch my back" or "Christ, you're in elementary school". (Which isn't even true—well, it is for Rose, but Keiko's twelve, she's in middle school). Or, in one case, nothing but free candy and stranger danger "jokes". And the less said about the times they've tried to use the resonant bell to help someone else, the better.

Most of the natives aren't as bad, but some of them get in on it too. Gilbert and the lonely old person at Oedon Chapel had what she's pretty sure were minor panic attacks when she told them she was a hunter (Rose and her hadn't been partnered when she met them for the first time). She actually had to break down Gilbert's door to fill a glass of water for the coughing fit it brought on, and since she doesn't know how to fix doors, Gilbert's too sick to fix doors, and she didn't know about the chapel then, she made a barricade in the doorway afterwards and visits whenever she can to check that it's still holding. It is, but Gilbert himself seems to be getting sicker, and she doesn't know what to do about it. Yharnam's only medicine, blood, isn't helping him, and it's not like she can take him to the obviously messed-up doctor.

The crazy machine gun man in the old town below Yharnam, once he noticed who he was shooting at (somehow, despite the gauze over his eyes), climbed down from his tower, ambushed them from under a bridge like some angry troll, stuffed them in a sack, and dropped them with Alfred behind the church that houses the entrance to the old town. He also left a sealed envelope addressed to Gehrman with Alfred, who passed it to Keiko and Rose, who passed it to Gehrman, who burned it without reading it once he learned who it was from. That was satisfying to watch.

Keiko's certain she could have killed him were it a fair fight. Eventually.

Gehrman, Doll, Henryk, and Alfred don't make a fuss about it. The doctor, Iosefka, doesn't either, but... Keiko doesn't like her. Doesn't like the way she laughs. You're not supposed to judge a person by their appearance, but Keiko's pretty sure a laugh doesn't count as part of a person's appearance, so she feels exactly no guilt judging Iosefka by her serial killer giggle. If Yharnam's taught her anything, it's that the way a person laughs says more about them than their words can.

Finding a foreigner who also doesn't treat them like they're incompetent gives her some hope that they didn't waste their Insight buying the bells. The concept of the bells is impossibly useful, the ability to summon extra pairs of hands anywhere or watch how other hunters take on difficult beasts, but in practice it's been mostly exasperating.

"Rose knows the town best," she says. "She takes point, and I cover her. Point out traps, things that might be useful, kill or injure beasts before she reaches them."

"And for buildings?"

Rose is edging towards the gatekeeper's corpse, hand inching out towards the top hat. It is in very good condition, considering its owner's state. Keiko answers, "We don't go inside houses—"

"It's rude to break other people's belongings, even if they're not there to see it," Rose explains. She finally touches the hat, and it vanishes into her inventory, never again to see the light of the evening sun. Her mask shifts. Keiko knows she's mouthing "Sorry". A slug, hidden earlier under the hat, oozes into a crack in the skull's scalp. The oily glow of its slime illuminates the corpse's eye sockets.

"—so it's not that much a problem. Sometimes beasts come _out_ of them though. She keeps an eye out for those, since I can't see them from the roofs." Keiko shifts her gaze back to Asuna. "How do you do it when you're alone?"

Asuna straightens slightly in surprise. "I... hunt beasts. There isn't..." She shakes herself out. "I kill anything that moves. If I die, I can come back. It's not an issue."

Keiko has never been more grateful to have Rose. "That sounds awful. Why don't you look for a partner? It makes hunting a lot less risky, and... I mean, Rose is my best friend. I trust her with my life all the time, and she hardly ever lets me down. It's nice to count on someone to have my back when I'm going to do something risky."

Asuna considers them for a moment before she responds, "That's why I've never wanted a partner."

That pulls Keiko up short. "Because you don't want a friend?"

"I have a friend," Asuna says, tapping a finger on the handle of her axe. "It's reliable. You can't miss the signs of a weapon about to break." Her eyes linger on Rose, who flinches. She opens her mouth to say something else, but she stops before making any sound, and Keiko barely notices taking a few small steps to stand in front of her partner. Not for the first time, she wishes she was the taller one.

Asuna changes the subject. "You'll want me with Rose-chan, then?"

Not particularly, but Keiko glances at the fancy rifle hanging from her belt—it looks like it has some range, but it's not the weapon in her hand. She's not a long-ranged fighter. "That's best."

Asuna nods. "I don't want to involve myself in your first fight if you don't require the help. Until I've seen how you fight, I may only get in your way." She starts to put the slug—augur?—back, but pauses. "Do you know the name Laurence?"

"No."

Rose asks, "Do you mean Vicar Laurence?"

"He's with the Church?"

"He founded the Healing Church," Rose says, "and discovered blood healing. I think... he was a student at Byrgenwerth for a time, but... I might be remembering a different person."

"Where is he?" Asuna asks.

"He passed on years ago," says Rose.

Asuna frowns. "Where would his body be?"

"...A graveyard? If you can find Vicar Amelia, she must know. If you don't mind the question, what... what do you want to know for?"

"I'm not sure."

"Why not?" Keiko asks.

"I heard the name once, didn't know who it belonged to."

That seems to be the end of it, because she looks about to put the augur back. She's not a terribly chatty person. To be fair, Keiko probably wouldn't be either with a mouth inexplicably full of slime most of the time.

"Hey, Asuna-san," says Keiko, "do you—" She gestures vaguely. "When it poops."

Rose recoils, eyes wide. Asuna takes the question in stride and shakes her head. _It doesn't_ , she writes.

"Night of the hunt," Keiko remembers, relieved that she doesn't have to deal with that image. Everything not directly hunt-related is on hold. She thinks beasts might be the exception—she's seen them gorging on corpses and trying to bite off pieces of the living—but she's never come across any leavings from them either, so maybe they eat because it's just what beasts do.

The doorway at the bottom of the staircase comes out at the top of a steep hill. As Rose and Asuna start down along the winding path, Keiko follows above, climbing from outcropping to ledge and occasionally working her way ahead to root out ambushes. She keeps half an eye on Asuna, but the older hunter's behaving herself, and Rose isn't too much more nervous than usual.

She spots a few strands of hair over a boulder, their owner hidden in a shallow indent in the face of the hill. She heads to an angle where she can see a sliver of the beast's hand, pale in the shadows, sights down the rifle's barrel, adjusts her aim. She disappears her gun back into her inventory and waves to catch Rose's attention.

Rose quietly updates Asuna on the situation, then waves back to Keiko.

The rifle spear drops heavily back into her hands. It's ungainly, nearly as long as she is tall and weighing too much to handle comfortably, but it's accurate to a decent range, and she doesn't use it for actual fighting. It takes a moment to bring it around to point at the creature again. Then she fires.

The bullet ricochets off the boulder to bury in the ground, but the sudden movement startles the enemy to alertness. She bounds out of her hiding place, and Rose is there to meet her with steel and quicksilver.

The beast jumps away from Rose's saw cleaver, brandishing her torch; Rose fires, but Keiko knows even as the pistol's trigger is bending back that she mistimed it, too eager for blood. The beast barely flinches. Rose recovers quickly, though, ducking under the beast's arm as she retaliates, and Keiko takes the opening.

The beast staggers, howling as Keiko's toxic blood forces itself into her veins. With a yell of her own, Rose shunts the saw into her inventory so she can bury her suddenly furry arm up to the elbow in the beast's guts.

The beast goes rigid for only a moment. And then Rose wrenches her arm back along with half their prey's innards and what seems like several liters of blood, shoving the beast away with her pistol's muzzle as she does. The creature that was a person once crumples without a sound. Rose ducks her head and shakes her hand out, scattering gore to the dirt.

Movement in her peripheral catches Keiko's attention. It's Asuna. She's—

"Damn it," Keiko says, surprised. They forgot to explain, didn't they? " _Rose_!"

Rose whirls on her feet and launches forwards, ramming her saw into Asuna's arm and dragging it across before the older hunter can finish her swing. Asuna tries to kick her away, but Rose darts aside and brings her weapon up again; Asuna meets her this time, overpowers her even one-handed. Rose struggles to hold her ground, a shout rising in her throat.

Just before Asuna can disarm her, Keiko fires. Asuna startles back. The bullet misses by several feet. Keiko wasn't trying to hit her.

"Stop! Rose, stop," she shouts. Rose stutters to stillness mid-motion. Asuna stabs a vial into her leg; the ragged, gaping wound in her arm seals over exposed bone. Asuna doesn't visibly react, and Keiko wonders, with a tint of scorn, how afraid of pain she must be to have stacked so many levels into endurance. "Asuna... san, if you attack Rose again I'll shoot you. My bullets _hurt_. Back off."

Asuna turns her attention entirely to Keiko, who meets where her eyes probably are beneath the shadow her cap's brim casts. "It's called a visceral attack," Keiko calls as levelly as she can through the resentment seething unvoiced in her throat. "Other hunters do it too. It doesn't mean anyone's turning into a beast."

Asuna cocks her head faintly and extends the axe's handle. Keiko imagines her inventory menu, fixing the silencing blank's position in her mind. She'd rather clear up the misunderstanding or, failing that, kill Asuna, but if it comes down to a choice between resolving this cleanly or letting it turn into a fight on unfamiliar ground with beasts lurking about, there's no question on which to pick.

"I don't want to fight you." Rose is lying. Keiko doesn't know whether it's for her own sake or for Asuna and Keiko. She's trembling, whole body shaking, except for her hands that are nearly as steady as Keiko's. She wants to fight Asuna, and kill her, and wear her skin as a cape and her eyes on a pendant.

Rose isn't a beast, but humans can be mad too. She says, "Please, don't make me fight you."

Keiko bites her lip hard enough to split skin. This is something she doesn't know how to help Rose with, something she's only ever been able to watch her partner struggle through alone. The burn of helplessness isn't any less painful now than it's ever been.

Asuna draws in the dirt with the butt of her axe. _who_

Keiko falters. Then she licks the blood off her lip, steadies herself, and asks, voice carrying clearly, "Who? Like who else uses it?"

Asuna nods.

" _I_ do."

That should be enough for a foreigner, but Asuna doesn't move, as if she's still waiting. Keiko hesitates before she adds, "And Henryk-ojiisan." He's the one who taught them how. Only useful thing he's done all evening. "Alfred-san, too." She's never seen Alfred perform it personally, but they've come across some of his work after the fact. The signs of a well-struck visceral attack are really, really hard to mistake. It's the squelching under their boots when they walk near that gives it away, and the unique smell of ruptured intestines.

When Keiko doesn't say more, Asuna scrapes her foot across the word.

It's Keiko's turn to wait now while Asuna stands still as a gargoyle. Rose wrenches herself away from Asuna and starts pacing, eyes fixed on the ground ahead of her, weapons appearing and disappearing in her hands. Keiko makes a note to bring back something interesting for the messengers if they find the chance.

Asuna lifts her axe. Keiko sets pressure against the rifle's trigger while Rose stills, but Asuna only shoves the handle in and, with a hesitance that shows stark against the fluid certainty that's all Keiko's seen from her, stows it on her belt. Her hand jerks away from the weapon to reach for her mask. "If you want to kill me," she says, "I won't stop you. Only— make it quick, if you would."

Killing a dreaming hunter wouldn't be murder, but just because they don't stay dead doesn't mean it's not permanent in other ways. It's cold, and it's dark, and it hurts, and any gathered blood echoes are left behind.

It's meant to be a lesson, as well as Keiko can tell—if you do something and die, then maybe you should try doing something different next time. But there's no lesson to be learned from just _letting_ yourself be killed. Sure, Asuna tried to murder Rose from behind like the worst kind of coward for a reason that's no reason at all—

Keiko pauses. Considers. Recalls that she was entirely on board with the idea less than a minute ago. It's only the thought of killing something that has no intention of fighting back that's given her doubts. "Rose?" she asks.

Rose glances up at her, then takes a deep breath and turns back to Asuna. "Is that how you say sorry?"

Asuna frowns. "This isn't an apology."

"But... then, what is it?"

"Recompense. A life for a life. It isn't a fair trade. My life isn't worth as much as yours, after what I did. But it's what I'm offering."

"What? You can't say that! That's— _you_ aren't..." Roses crosses her arms. "I don't want to kill you. I won't. But I... want something else. Do you know where I— Do you know where I lived?" Her voice only falters a little on the last words.

"I can find it. It's in Central Yharnam?"

"From the lamp, it's up—"

"I can find it," Asuna interrupts. Keiko makes a sound but holds her peace. "What do you want me to do?"

"Two streets down, to the south, there's a house with a stack of coffins to the left of the door. The coffin at the top has a hunter in black inside." Using the Church's name when it isn't necessary is bad luck, so saying a hunter is wearing black or white is how most Church hunters are referred to. Rose, who wasn't raised to fear the Church, does the same from habit instead. "You can't miss it. The girl living there, can you take her somewhere safe? To Oedon Chapel, or— or if you've found a safer place. It's not good for her to be alone."

It's the first Keiko's heard of this. Rose catches her eye and hurriedly looks away. The older girl resolutely tamps down the sting of betrayal. Rose owes her absolutely nothing, and if she'd rather entrust this to a stranger before Keiko, that's her right.

"Should I let her know that you sent me?"

"Please," Rose says quietly. "Tell her... tell her I wish I could take it back. Tell her I am so, so very sorry. I know she can't forgive me, but I— don't want to lose her, not like this."

"I'll tell her." From Asuna's tone, Rose might have asked her to pick up some bread from the store. "That's all, then?" She dips her head in a quick, shallow bow, fingers flicking out to pull up her menu. "I won't intrude more than I have."

"Hey!" Keiko snaps. Her voice stops Asuna as surely as a gunshot would. "We called you here to help. You haven't done much of that."

"I haven't," Asuna agrees. She doesn't protest when Keiko sends her ahead alone as an outrider. Maybe something will eat her. It's a good thought.

As soon as she's moved out of sight past a bend, Keiko climbs down to join Rose on the path. "Will she be alright?" Rose asks distantly.

She sags into the older girl's hug. "Are you okay?" Keiko murmurs. She leans her cheek against Rose's, feels the heat of her through two masks and a layer of cooling gore.

Tentatively, Rose returns the hug, wrapping her arms around Keiko like she's not sure they belong there. Her hands fist in Keiko's cloak. They're shaking. "No," she says, "but thank you, Keiko."

Keiko breathes out through her mouth. "In this world, is she...?"

"I moved the coffins in front of the door."

"You— you did," Keiko realizes. She remembers it. She assumed Rose heard movement from the house and didn't want what was inside coming onto the street. "You didn't tell me."

"I never told her either."

 _Are we the same?_ Keiko doesn't ask. She doesn't know what she would do with the answer.

Rose says, "I am sorry. You... can't know what I did. There's nothing I can say that won't make things worse between her and me. I didn't tell you because I— I was... I _am_ scared of you judging me poorly for it. I— even the ones I ..."

"I wouldn't do that."

"No."

Keiko waits for the hitch in Rose's breaths to fade. "Do you want to check on her?"

Rose nods against her shoulder. "When... When we find the next lamp, if you wouldn't—?"

"We'll do that," Keiko says firmly.

"Alright." Her grip on Keiko's cloak loosens. "Do you— do you think we'll see my grandad again tonight?"

"...It's going to be a long night," Keiko hedges. "There's plenty of time left." She can't actually imagine anything short of divine intervention keeping the old hunter from killing himself or worse by nightfall, whenever that'll be, but Doll will curse before Keiko says that in Rose's hearing.

The sun hasn't set any farther when Rose steps away. Keiko turns to look the way Asuna went, making an annoyed sound with the side of her mouth. "We don't need to rush," she says. "She's probably dead already."

"Oh!" Rose's eyes widen. "Do you think so?"

Keiko sighs. "I don't know. We can check, I guess." She wouldn't care either way, but the concern in Rose's voice is real.

Asuna's trail of bloody footprints is easy to follow, even where she backtracked after heading down a dead end. Keiko's opinion of her sinks that much lower with every burnt and crushed corpse they come across. She can't fathom how Asuna made it this far. There's no sense or strategy in how she hunts, no skill born of experience; she relies on brute force and the ability to heal from nearly anything as a crutch for finesse. Charging enemies head on, charging _groups_ of enemies head on, taking injuries that would be fatal without immediate treatment in return for getting in a hit of her own, prioritizing the areas of the body that yield the largest blood spray over ones that will be more quickly lethal, attacking bodies that are already dead.

Despite herself, Keiko starts to feel offended. She does have her professional pride, and Asuna's the kind of hunter who gives all the rest of them a bad name. This is just— it's so _sloppy._

Not like a hunter at all, really.

"She needs help," Rose says.

Keiko snorts. "No, she doesn't. She already has a friend."

Rose glances sidelong at her. "You don't have to hold a grudge for me."

"I know," Keiko says, "but I want to."

The shadows deepen. It's gradual enough that Keiko writes it off at first as them heading deeper into the woods, but then Rose stops in her tracks and tips her head back. "The sky."

High above the horizon, the full moon glows like a very dim beacon. Keiko squints at it, wondering what happened to the sun, and then she realizes that it's night and wonders instead why the dream's landscape is unrecognizable. It takes a moment longer to remember that the night sky doesn't only exist in the dream.

Even knowing that, the more she stares at the moon over the trees, the more unsettled she feels. It doesn't look natural.

They find Asuna fighting three men and two dogs. Rose starts to move forward, but Keiko grabs her sleeve and pulls her behind a tree. "But—" Rose begins.

"Shh, it's alright. You can help her if it looks like she needs it."

She looks like she needs it already. Five on one is long odds. She slams a dog aside mid-lunge, staggers as the other one buries its teeth in her shoulder and its claws in her back, and only manages to stumble away so the pitchfork takes her in the side rather than the chest.

Keiko doesn't see what Asuna does, but the dog mauling her suddenly jumps back with a howl, flames charring the fur around its mouth. The other leaps at her again just as a bullet in her gut staggers her, and she goes down, wrestling with the dog to keep its fangs away from her head. The man with the pitchfork stabs her through the shoulder and leaves the makeshift weapon there to start using his feet instead.

Tentacles burst from Asuna's face. "What?" Keiko says as the dog goes flying out into empty air over the side of the path.

Asuna tries to get to her feet, but it looks like the pitchfork's pinning her to the ground. She gives up and grabs the man's leg when he kicks her again; the man overbalances, screaming as Asuna crushes his ankle.

With the dog out of the way, the man with the torch and rickety plank shield steps close and presses the fire against Asuna's face.

Rose darts out from the tree, whistling for the remaining dog's attention; Keiko doesn't stop her this time, only levels her rifle at the enemy gunman. A shot to the chest takes him down while Asuna grabs her attacker's torch. The flames leap back from Asuna as if repulsed, crawling up the torch to wreathe their wielder's arm in white and blue.

Keiko puts him and the man whimpering over his leg out of their misery. She can't target the dog without risking hitting Rose, but her partner kills it on her own without too much trouble. There's a long scratch down her front that closes over when she wipes the dog's blood across it.

Asuna wrenches the pitchfork out and tosses it away as she sits up. She empties four vials—more than she should need—before she rises and traipses over to loot the bodies and refill her vials.

Keiko breaks cover and heads over, Rose following once she tugs her saw out of the dog's neck. Keiko stands over Asuna as the older girl roots through the torch wielder's chest cavity for gems. She says, "You're an idiot."

Asuna snaps a rib out of the way.

"You can go back when you're done with this."

There aren't any gems, but there does turn out to be a drop of coldblood dew. They're blood echoes in solid form that can be crushed to yield the usable version. Asuna hands it to Keiko, nods, and moves on to the next corpse.

"What was that with the tentacles? And the fire?"

Asuna taps her cheek, then shrugs.

Keiko frowns. "The augur, and... you don't know?"

Asuna drops the organ she's kneading for stones and holds out her hand. A spark flares over her palm, bursting into an orange flame that quickly dies without fuel.

Gehrman did something similar when he burned the Old Yharnam hunter's letter. It looked like the paper spontaneously combusted while he held it. She'll ask him about it when they return, and the augur as well. Even if parts of her mask weren't melted to her face, Keiko doubts Asuna could give a decent answer about anything to save her life.

"It might be— You should—" Rose stops again. Softly, she says, "Miss Asuna, please talk to someone."

Asuna stops her work to look up at Rose, making a questioning sound in her throat.

"That's the second thing I'll ask of you, if it's alright. Talk— talk to someone, about how— about anything. Talk to them about anything. And... make a habit of it. Promise you will?"

"You always forgive so easily," Keiko says after Asuna's left.

Rose shakes her head. "There's nothing to forgive."


	14. Yharnam Outskirts: Agil

AN: Andrew is Agil's real name. Yharnam Outskirts is not an area in the actual game.

* * *

It's an exhaustive and exacting process, aging blood to something between alcohol and opium. On the other hand, blood is easier to work with than rice or grapes or apples, he has access to better equipment in the form of an entire abandoned distillery on the outskirts of the town, and there's all the time in the world to figure out how to get it right. It's easier than it could have been.

He didn't make alcohol back home aside from dabbling in it out of curiosity, so the work's largely trial and error. Andrew keeps himself busy figuring out the equipment's functions and the blood's properties.

"Does it give buffs?" Kirito asked the first time they met.

Andrew just got access to the bell shop through what he's learned were unconventional means—most people gain Insight from discovering world lore, meeting certain NPCs, or fighting bosses, but Andrew found a note at some point that said, _try eating slugs for co-op_. It seemed sensible enough.

Kirito dropped several names—Gilbert, Oedon Chapel, Cathedral Ward—and didn't seem to know what to think of it when Andrew just shrugged. "I've seen some notes about the Cathedral Ward, but I can't say the same for the rest."

To his question about buffs, Andrew replied, "Drunkenness is usually a _de_ buff in video games, isn't it? But you can try it. Take some with you, let me know how it goes."

"You haven't tested it?"

"Our bodies out there," Andrew said, "you ever think about what's happening to them? Since we're still in this place, the NerveGears must still be on. There must be a reason they haven't been taken off."

"Kayaba—or someone else, we haven't been able to confirm that Kayaba's responsible, but he is the likeliest suspect—anyway, he might have taken off some of the safety measures," Kirito said, frowning. "Theoretically, it's possible for a NerveGear to send out a microwave capable of burning out the user's brain. Fatally. He's probably holding all ten thousand of us hostage through that function."

"That's interesting. Makes my theory a little more plausible. I did test some of this, to see how it was turning out, and... well, that was only the one time. I got a little nervous when I noticed I was getting a buzz. It's why I made you tie that around your mask." Blood smells about as strong as it tastes. The hunter's masks on their own keep out the worst of it, but too much still makes it through, so Andrew makes a habit of always having two strips of cloth soaking in the copper bowl of incense sticks and water he keeps in the dream.

Kirito was quiet for a while as Andrew, for lack of anything else to do, checked the stills for the hundredth time. "I test it on the monsters now," Andrew said. "Bottle it up, throw it into a crowd, see how they react. They're not connoisseurs, but I can tell how strong it is by how fast they jump on it."

"That— That item already exists. It's called a pungent blood cocktail. You can buy it from the blood echo shop if you have the badge for it."

"Really? Is it useful?"

"It's situational, but yes."

"There you are."

Kirito said slowly, "You've spent the entire evening making an item that the store already sells."

"I guess I have," said Andrew.

"Did you give up?"

"On what?"

"Getting out of here. Ending the hunt."

"Will that get us out of here?" Andrew mused. He raised a hand to stop Kirito from interrupting. "Before you tell me it's worth a try, I could say the same about anything. Unless you know why we were trapped in the first place?"

"It's our most likely way out." Kirito crossed his arms. "There's lore backing it up. The night only lasts as long as the hunt does. Ending the hunt will end the night, morning will come, and we'll wake up."

"Or it could be a metaphor for Kayaba frying our brains. Assuming it isn't, do you know how to end the hunt?"

Kirito didn't. Neither has anyone else Andrew's asked. Another person he summons summarizes the situation for him: "Man, we have no fucking clue what we're doing. All the front-runners are like, 'We need to end the hunt!' But _how_?

"Like, okay, it's probably got something to do with the source of the healing blood, but," and he starts ticking off on his fingers, "that could mean the Healing Church, it could mean Byrgenwerth which is where the guys who founded the Church came from, it could mean Cainhurst with all the magic and vampires and shit, it could mean Old Yharnam and maybe all we really need to do is figure out how to burn down New Yharnam too—well, alright, maybe not that, the Pyromancer's probably already tried doing that, because she's the Pyromancer, and she's definitely still here. But the point about Old Yharnam stands. Or it might be the Chalice Dungeon which apparently has something to do with the place that was here before Yharnam." He starts again from his little finger. "It could be that trap area that's screwing over all the big names. Maybe we're supposed to be helping that crazy Church bitch who tried to turn Iosefka into a blue bobblehead, in which case I am fucked and I don't regret it. It could be Yahar'gul which, I mean, nobody's really sure what's up with that place but apparently there might be baby sacrifice involved?

"Oh, and some people have started hallucinating babies crying in the distance, it's really freaking everyone out because no one knows if it's actual mass hallucinations or just part of Yharnam's amazing local color. That might have something to do with ending the hunt, too, but we _don't know._ "

He pauses for breath. Andrew says, "Sounds rough."

"Honestly, you've got the right idea here. All of the big names have no fucking chill, I swear. It's like, guys, we don't even know we're going in the right direction, we don't even know if we're on the right track in the right damn country, slow the fuck down. The girls especially! There's like three or four hundred people with bells now, I think, and _maybe_ twenty of them are girls, it's probably really closer to fifteen, but, like— have you met the Pyromancer?"

"Not yet."

"She is the definition of no chill, man. She's _named_ for it. Like, I get it's a full moon tonight and everything has the word blood in it and all but _lady_ —"

"I am trying to think of a woman I know who wouldn't kill you if you finish that sentence," Andrew says, "and I keep coming up short."

Andrew's not trying to clear the game. He wants nothing to do with Yharnam, nothing to do with Kayaba's madness, so he's set up camp as far from the center of town as possible, blocked off the entrances of the distillery with bonfires that—like all of the other fires in Yharnam—won't burn out on their own, convinced the Messengers to set up a lamp right inside the distillery, and only goes outside when he has to replenish supplies.

And he listens. He summons other people, lets them rant at him about whatever they want, and distances himself further from what's happening by treating what they tell him as just stories of events with no bearing on him. If he fills himself with other people's stories, then he won't have to think about his own.

He knows enough about psychology to guess that it's not healthy behavior, but he's fairly certain he's lying in a hospital bed with a high-tech guillotine strapped to his head and food being injected into him through a tube. "Healthy" means very little in comparison.

"The beta testers know what they're doing." The man's not wearing a cap. It's how the Rolling Thunder's faction differentiates themselves from regular invaders. Andrew doesn't agree with most of their points, but he almost enjoys listening to them—it's fascinating how people trapped in the same situation can see the world so differently from each other. "They have the Rat organizing them, feeding them information. It'd be bad enough if they only weren't sharing it with us, but no, they send their cheating beta tester invaders after us, TPB and Darth Gun and all the rest of those bastards. Sure, the Rat _says_ they're not working for her, but who believes her? But Patches got them good, eh? Serves them right."

Listening to them all, he finds he's not the only one forcing himself not to think about home. He gets a few who talk about their lives outside, their families and friends and pets and what might be happening in the television episodes they're missing, but the vast, vast majority of what he picks up is news about the player politics in Yharnam. The mutual hatred between the beta testers and Rolling Thunder's people, the Powder Kegs' isolationist tendencies, universal disbelief and increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories over the Pyromancer's existence, worry and disdain and fear for the more than nine thousand silent players, speculation about a creepy music box in some people's inventories that nobody remembers putting there and which the Messengers, when questioned with the Doll to translate, can only describe as a gift. It passes him by like so many words on the wind.

Someone says, "At least Kayaba gave us one good thing. You should hear the noises the Doll—"

Except for that. He fires his silencing blank for that. He does still have some opinions, apparently.


	15. Hunter's Dream: Kirito

The amygdala is a part of the brain that helps with establishing long-term memory and linking emotions to memories. Popularly, it's known more for the latter function, specifically for what it does in associating memories with fear.

It's also what Patches calls his god, albeit with a doctored pronunciation.

There are a few other things to note about Amygdala. For one: unlike every other boss so far, it doesn't heal between attempts. For two: this doesn't help as much as it should, because, unlike every other boss so far, this one's AI learns.

Kirito can almost understand it. Optional bosses being harder than the storyline ones is standard fare. Amygdala, though, isn't optional for anyone who wandered into Patches' trap. It's a giant monster that hits like a train, takes hits like a train, and doesn't have attack patterns. Throwing down this kind of difficulty spike out of nowhere would have been sufficient grounds for dropping the game in the real world. Kirito wouldn't have—he finishes every game he starts, regardless of how much he might not want to—but he can see it happening all too easily.

To make it somehow worse, the boss learns across games.

Kirito can name exactly the moment someone cottoned on to its head being the weak point because that was when, in Kirito and Argo's world, it started setting up obscuring dust clouds and angling itself to catch any attacks towards its head on its bony arms. When they started coordinating parties to deal with it, a member on—he thinks it was the second party he joined—had a cannon enhanced liberally with bone marrow ash strapped to his arm. Before the hunter fired a single shot, Amygdala aggroed against him, ignoring the melee fighters drawing nearer to it and the bullets peppering its hide, and the first move of the fight had been a claw backhanding him into the arena's walls hard enough to fracture the stone.

Once one person in any world has tried a tactic or weapon, it becomes increasingly less effective. For the most part, Bloodborne's been surprisingly lenient about failure—the main punishment for dying is the death itself, since lost blood echoes are capable of being retrieved. The change in the Nightmare Frontier isn't so much difficult to adjust to as it is plain irritating, yet another nonsensical difficulty curve added onto a boss that's already made of nothing but.

When an enemy's too difficult to take in a fight, Kirito's heard of people using indirect means, baiting it into traps or taking potshots at it from outside its range. Those aren't an option with Amygdala. After its first appearance, it always sets up a thick fog around its arena that lets only people inside and turns rock-solid to anyone who tries to force their way back through again. The only way to fight it is to take it head on.

All of that's without mentioning actually reaching the arena in the first place. The path through the canyon is fraught with strong enemies, a poisonous bog, a few invaders who still haven't gotten their heads on straight, hostile NPC hunters, and, occasionally, winter lanterns.

He rubs his eyes. He'll take Amygdala over another winter lantern any time of the night. At least Amygdala, for all its faults, will only kill him. A winter lantern would...

"That bad? What was it this time?"

"Maggots," Kirito says, dropping his hand into his lap. The beasts with the gaping mouths have massive worms living inside them that don't take well to having their hosts killed. The things aren't terribly bright, though. Kirito usually deals with them by putting a sheer drop between himself and the beast he's killing and then watching them hurl themselves off it to reach him.

The gap he chose this time was narrow enough for them to jump. He wasn't thinking. "No one's had any luck since I left?"

"I got two more notes from people saying Amygdala's completely countered them, and there's someone who's stopped answering messages. There's nothing I can do about it, so I'm trying not to worry," Argo says. "If you're asking about _good_ luck, then no, that's still in short supply." She lifts herself onto the ledge beside him. "Diavel's party got someone out. They knocked over the tower. It trashed the entire arena, apparently. Killed everyone there, including the overgrown spider."

Kirito blinks. "That's impressive. That's _really_ impressive. Whose world was it?"

"Lind's."

He sees what she means about bad luck. In Diavel's group, Lind's combat ability is second only to their leader. "At least it wasn't Diavel," he murmurs. At a normal volume, he says, "Amygdala won't fall for it again."

"Yeah. That's the part that sucks. What did you mean by it not being Diavel?"

"Diavel's the better fighter."

"Oh, right." She scratches her cheek. "Turns out killing Amygdala doesn't cut someone off from the Frontier, it just means all the Yharnam lamps are open again. Lind's still here."

"Wait, what?" Including Lind, there are four people who've made it out of the Nightmare. The first two happened during the earlier attempts, when it was still feasible for Amygdala to be beaten in a straight fight. Kirito himself landed the killing blow on one of them, and the boss has targeted him in every world since then. The third success was Asuna, who apparently somehow pulled it off entirely on her own. None of them have been back in the Nightmare Frontier since they escaped.

"The other three just don't want to come back here. Which is understandable. This place almost makes you miss Yharnam, doesn't it?"

"That doesn't make sense. I can see it with the other two, but the Pyromancer always helps with an area after she beats its boss. We saw her climb Vicar Amelia with her teeth, while on fire, seconds after having her arm torn off when she was level one. Amygdala isn't enough to scare her away."

"It might be," Argo says quietly. "We didn't know her that well."

She's right, but Kirito argues it anyway. "She co-oped in Yharnam for a while before she went dark. If she didn't come back here during that time, it was probably because she couldn't." He frowns. "We need to figure out how she killed it." That, at least, is true, regardless of whether or not it's related to the reason why she hasn't returned.

All of the other successes so far have involved five or six hunters—the host, which can be one or two people, along with two cooperators and two non-hostile invaders. (Possibly as Kayaba's poor concession to fairness, invaders can interact normally with Amygdala.) The method Asuna used, meanwhile, was effective enough that it only required one person.

The players in Yharnam who've asked her say she makes it sound like she killed Amygdala with fire, which... well, Kirito's tempted to say _obviously_. He was actually the first one to reach Amygdala and try that method, though, and he can't for the life of him imagine the circumstances that led to Asuna getting it to work. On her own, even.

There's been no way to get her to clarify. There's a significant delay for messages traveling between the Nightmare Frontier and Yharnam; by the time the news made it to Argo that Asuna returned to Yharnam, she was already out of reach.

Kirito's not as surprised as he should be. It's something that happens. The hunt gets to be too much, the motivation they've been using to fuel themselves this far burns out, they die one time too many—Kirito doesn't know what causes it, but the result is clear: a hunter stops summoning, stops letting themselves be summoned, stops leaving notes on the ground or responding to messages. A few go so far as to take up invading or talk their Messengers into not letting communication reach them at all.

Some of them come back from it not quite the same person they were. Most haven't come back at all.

It's strange. There's no reason he should, but he feels somewhat responsible that it happened to Asuna.

Argo eyes him. "I've been thinking about that one. Is there anything flammable in the arena?"

He hesitates. "If you covered Amygdala in oil—"

"Kirito," Argo says. "The only person who would blame you for taking a break is yourself."

"There's no _time_ for that. There isn't a way to tell how long it's been. We don't know when the people outside will decide to pull the plug. If we don't finish before then—" He makes a sharp motion with his hand.

"If they do that, then we'll die," says Argo, "and Kayaba will lose with no one to finish his game." She twists a pale flower off the stem and spins it between her fingers. "It's not so terrible."

Kirito snaps, "I am not going to judge my life by _Kayaba's_ standards."

"No? Whose standards are you using?"

"Whose do you think?"

"Not yours, clearly," she says, and Kirito isn't expecting his own flinch. The flower falls, drifting to rest on the path. It's not something he's ever paid attention to, but now it's impossible not to notice that he's never seen any other flowers on the Dream's paths before. "A person who's starving can only think about food. A person who hasn't slept can't think about anything but closing her eyes. What does a _boy_ who lets maggots eat him alive think about?"

He's on his feet, goosebumps prickling up his neck. "I didn't let them— I didn't _let_ them."

Argo laughs. "That's funny," she says, smiling without an inch of humor. "I thought you must have since you let them get close enough—"

It's a surprisingly quiet sound.

Argo pushes her front half off the ground to hack a wad of red onto the cobblestones. She gingerly wipes a splotch of saliva from her darkening cheek. Kirito's hand is still raised. He stares at her, afraid to blink. He saw what happened. If he closes his eyes for a moment, they'll lie again.

"Shit," Argo says thickly. He can't tell whether it's her bitten tongue or the ringing in his ears that muffles her voice. "Shit, I'm sorry. That was too far."

He blinks, and he's in a different part of the garden, forehead pressed against a gravestone and flowers fisted in his hands. He closes his eyes, lets gravity bow him until his head touches soil.

There's a warm hand on his back. "Sorry."

It's impossible to speak around the rough blockage in his throat. Heat presses against his eyes, trickles down his forehead.

When he can breathe again, he says, "Don't say sorry."

"You know how many levels I put into vitality and endurance. You didn't hurt me. I shouldn't have said that—I shouldn't have thrown it in your face like that."

" _Stop_." He breathes. "Please."

He hears the Messengers come for Argo. They're quiet, only betrayed by the flowers parting around them, and they leave just as silently when Argo waves them off. He can't smell any blood on her—she erased the evidence before she came to find him, and for some reason he's choking back tears. Argo pats his back like she read about how to do it from a manual.

When the tears have run dry, he pushes himself to his feet with the gravestone as support. Argo stays kneeling, looking up at him uncertainly, and doesn't move to follow when he staggers away.

He drinks a vial. It chases away the taste of mucus but doesn't do anything for the lingering ache in the back of his hand.

He heads out again. He keeps a careful distance from the beasts. For the ones with the gaping mouths, he aims exclusively for their guts, where the worms are, and counts on the explosive property of his blood to take the parasites out along with the hosts.

Every hunter's blood naturally has a different, seemingly random effect. It only starts to become noticeable after ten levels in bloodtinge. Darth Gun's blood, for instance, causes numbing and slows movement; it'll probably progress to paralysis when he levels it up more. Kirito's explodes. It's cathartic.

He tracks down the purple-eyed rock-lobber that claimed his echoes and blows up its head before it knows he's there. A Bold Hunter's Mark returns him to the Dream.

Argo isn't there. He waits by the place they always return to, bouncing his knee, and then restlessness drives him to track down the Plain Doll.

He doesn't like her. He doesn't like her at all. Possibly because she picked up the sentiment—it's not something he tries in any way to hide—he never sees her unless he looks for her first.

When he finds her, she tells him Argo left for the Frontier. He kills her and heads back to the entry point.

It's not only because he dislikes all the NPCs on principle. Resurrection after death returns a player to exactly the physical state they were when they first logged into the game. Their equipment can degrade, but the players themselves can't change at all.

With a single exception: the Doll. A lot of people who came in with hair or nails inconvenient for fighting have gotten her to trim it for them, and it _sticks_. She won't inflict actual harm no matter how much she's provoked, so there's no way to tell if it only applies to cosmetic changes, but Kirito's willing to bet that she can hurt them like nothing else in the game can. He suspects it's the same case with Gehrman, although he has no proof—Gehrman just vanishes if he's attacked and doesn't do haircuts.

One or both of them is going to be the final boss. Kirito's leaning towards the Doll, if only because it seems like Kayaba's style to make players fight the one most of them are more attached to. Maybe something will possess her, or she's actually the nice split personality of a monster, or she'll turn out to be a yandere. Whatever it is, he refuses to interact with her any more than absolutely necessary.

He visits the shop while he's waiting. The only source of lootable bullets in the Nightmare Frontier is the NPC hunters, who are few and far between, so he's constantly on the verge of running out.

There's an item in the shop he doesn't remember being there before. He hasn't a picked up a badge since the last one, so the shop's stock shouldn't have changed. Curious, he sets enough blood echoes aside to buy it once he's replenished his stock of bullets.

It's a katana. The description's not that descriptive and unusually grandiose, the name's Japanese, and it was apparently made by a hunter foreign to Yharnam. He has a suspicion.

"Let me apologize," Kirito says as soon as Argo materializes in a silver fog. "What I did wasn't— it was wrong, I should never have—"

"Hey, none of that," Argo interrupts. "I did wrong, you did wrong, we can both mosey on past it as wiser people, capiche? What's that you're holding?"

"I—" Kirito bites the word off. In truth, he's relieved that she doesn't want to talk about, and he's guilty about the relief because it doesn't feel right to pretend that what he did is something that can just be ignored.

If he wants to keep talking about it, though, he'll have to force the conversation back in that direction. He's too tired to try to argue. "It's called an akatsuki," he says, handing it to her hilt-first. "The shop's selling it."

Argo makes a sound. She vanishes it into her inventory to look at the description. "This... this sounds like it was made by a _player_."

"I'm thinking of using it for melee. I have a little kendo training."

"Kendo and kenjutsu are two separate things," Argo says absently, frowning at the naginata in her hands. "You might want to wait until we're back in Yharnam before you try it. Did you chase Gehrman off again?" She glances at his expression and grinds the heel of her palm against her forehead. "What about the Doll? Kii-bou, really?"

"We can refresh the area."

"Eh, too much work. I'll ask the Messengers." She crouches and taps the ground, whistling. A cluster of Messengers sprouts up in front of her. "Hey there. Did a player make this?" A few of the things nod. "And they put it in the shop? Can anyone put something up in the shop? I'll rephrase that: can any _hunter_ put something up in the shop? And every other hunter can buy it?"

She rocks back on her heels. "Could I put something like a guide in there?"

They seem to consider it before nodding.

Argo looks up at Kirito, eyes wide. "Well, that— changes the game a bit, doesn't it?"

"If you put up a guide to gathering Insight in Central Yharnam," Kirito says slowly.

"Exactly. I'll..." She shakes her head. "The second we get back to Yharnam, I'll start putting something together. First, I think I know how Aa-chan beat Amygdala. If I'm right, and it works, it should be enough to get everyone out in one go as long as we cooperate to all start at the same time so Amygdala doesn't catch on."

"What?"

"Aa-chan's exact words were that she 'burned it down'. I thought that sounded off, but Amygdala's big enough that it wouldn't be too strange to describe it that way, and it isn't like there's anything else in the arena to burn. Diavel knocking over the tower reminded me, though. I thought, what if I was right in the beginning and she wasn't talking about Amygdala at all?

"And then you said that she would have come back if she could." She grins. "So she burned down something that _wasn't_ Amygdala and that also cut off her access to this place. The only way to do that would be to extinguish the lamps, and you wouldn't be able to do that by just setting something _inside_ the arena on fire."

"That thing's a _puzzle boss_?"

Argo shrugs. "I went through part of the canyon just putting lit matches on everything I could reach. Turns out the boulders the rock-lobbers throw are flammable. Depending on how deep the mineral veins go, it might be possible to collapse the whole canyon if we burn away enough of them."

Kirito's hands curl into fists. He imagines he's wrapping his fingers around Kayaba's throat.

"Did you know, there's actually a difference between the expression of someone contemplating murder and someone contemplating murder of Kayaba Akihiko specifically? Honestly, the things you learn in video games," Argo muses. "We can start as soon as I pass the message on to everyone. You can hold yourself back that long, right?"

* * *

AN: Finally wrapped up the Amygdala issue. Next chapter should be back to Asuna.


	16. Forbidden Woods

She meets a man in the woods.

He jolts when her axe knocks against a wall, hurriedly scrambles to his feet and backs away with his hands raised. "Blimey! I thought— oh, you're not a villager." He lowers his hands and takes another step back, balancing on the balls of his bare feet. "Poor monster. How far gone are you?"

He's blind, half his head wrapped in gauze, and she's plastered in so much blood he must not be able to smell the moonlight through it. Well. That, and he likely can't smell much in any case with the blood and bile of the bodies on the windmill's roof staining his teeth and cheeks and beard. The man's clearly malnourished, scarred skin pockmarked with ulcers and stretched like old leather over his skeleton. With no normal food around, meat is still meat, and the bodies of the uninfected are safer than the alternatives. Odd that he didn't cook it first, at least. Or not. Cooking would congeal the blood.

She taps her axe against her leg. Out in the woods, something wails, shrill and ringing. The man gradually settles his weight back onto his heels, frown deepening. "What are you supposed to be?"

He worries at his lip and turns his chin down to conceal the flare of his nostrils. She waits and doesn't wonder what conclusion he'll come to.

Recognition comes in a tensing of muscles, in a foot shifting into a stance she doesn't recognize. "Well, I'll be! You're a hunter! Why didn't you say so? I took you for a monster. There haven't been your kind through here since they sealed the gate. You'll be the reason it's gone so quiet down there?" He rubs his hands together. "Since... you've made it safe enough for me to head down... would you know of any safe havens? I can't stay here all night. One beast's made it here," he nods at the corpses, "what's to say there won't be another?"

"...Oedon Chapel," she says, settling the augur on her cap. "You're a hunter."

The smile slips off his face. "It's just a beggar tonight. I'm retired."

"Retired," Asuna repeats.

"Hard to imagine, right? Well, thank you for the tip. I really do owe you for this. Remind me if we see each other again; I want to find something to pay you back with."

Asuna takes a saw cleaver out of her inventory. He looks like someone who's used to fighting with a weapon with a range short enough it's almost an extension of his hands. "It's not a short walk."

"Are you holding something?"

"Saw cleaver."

He goes still. She can't tell if he's breathing.

"Oh." He walks towards her, and the stone steps might be rice paper for how carefully he moves. "You're terribly kind." He runs his hands along the flat of the blade, tracing the teeth. He smells of dust and rot and worse. He takes it from her and holds it not entirely comfortably, like a friend he hasn't met in years and is remembering how to talk to again. Asuna looks away, trying not to picture ever having to treat her own axe like that. "Stars, I really don't know how to thank you."

"Don't die on the way there."

"'course not. Come find me. I'll have something." He gives a quick, darting bow with one arm held horizontally in front his chest; his grin shows teeth. "Good blood guide you."

He's right that another beast might come up. She doesn't want to leave the bodies where they are. It's one thing to let a human use them, another altogether to let a beast do the same. She pries the tops off three of the empty barrels in the corner and lowers the corpses in before sealing them again. It's a temporary measure, but it's only for one night. It'll have to do.

(She tries. She tries, very hard, not to think about how the retired hunter smells far more beast than human. About how, beneath the moonlight shielding her, she doesn't know that she's not the same.)

Yharnam's streets are familiar, stone and cobbles and snarling beasts. She can navigate by the smell of incense and the depths of the shadows. She knows the patrol routes of the faceless things that wield lanterns and burning stakes, the borders of each dog pack's and wolf-beast's territory, the alleys and corners most likely to conceal one of the hooded sack-carrying creatures.

The monsters in the woods are more of the hissing, spitting, and scaly variety. The stones, when they're carved, are just as likely to be modeled after the nightmare's host and scattered in clumps across the overgrown paths as they are to be the brick foundations of the village's buildings. The trees muffle sound in odd ways. The moon is soft and dim, the shadows etched under its light blurred and faded at the edges. There are ticks in the grass and mosquitoes in the creeks.

Perhaps it's because of those things that she's dying more.

Perhaps not. If she knew the reason, she would fix it. Continuously backtracking from the lamp is growing tedious. She's better than this. She knows she's better than this, but the reality isn't matching up with what she knows to be true and it's— frustrating.

It's more than frustrating. She steps back too slowly from a lashing coil of snakes after getting a hit in, and they wrap around her leg and cling tightly. She smashes them to pieces, stabs a vial into her thigh, and moves on, shoving aside the trembling in her hands and the constriction in her chest; and when she drops dead from poison she punches the path in the dream hard enough to split the stone and shatter her hand and arm.

The pain chokes a snarl from her. She grits her teeth until she feels enamel crack, gets to her feet, and heads to the gravestone that leads to the lamp in the woods.

Again and again, it's rank stupidity that kills her. She overestimates the recovery window between the snake-headed beast's attacks, doesn't notice the crowd of snakes that spontaneously rises from the forest floor around their feet, approaches the giant pig from upwind, dismisses the indistinct movement under the water, targets the two beasts trying to bash her skull in instead of the Molotov-thrower supporting them.

She's better than this. She shouldn't be dying because of habits that Central Yharnam and the graveyard beast trained out of her before the moon even rose.

The hut has two beasts hiding inside, one in the corner in the back behind a table and another right beside the doorway. She shoots out the doorknob, simultaneously alerting them and wasting a bullet, and waits for them to lumber out.

They're beasts. There's no room at all for doubt. Their pupils look like ink blots, ruddy fur grows from their faces and chests and arms, their limbs stretch out too long, they have claws in place of nails. Now, while the first one is trapped in the doorway and still surprised, she should—

But she freezes.

It focuses on her, runs at her with its pitchfork up, and by the time Asuna finally, finally moves it's too late to do anything other than make sure the tines pierce her gut instead of anywhere fatal. She staggers back, grabs the handle and wrenches, snapping it off at the end. She uses the momentum to carry her out of the way of its charge, stepping aside and swinging her axe while the beast hurtles past her.

A single solid hit is all it'll take to put either of them down. She can do it while they're off balance during an attack, take advantage of her speed to simply strike first or step around to hit them from a direction they're not guarding from, create an opening herself by shooting them or catching their attack on her axe.

The first one takes her three swings. One swing clips its shoulder, the second takes off its leg below the knee, the third caves in its back.

The other beast she kills with her hands, hooking her fingers through its eyes and her thumb into a gap from a missing tooth while the handle of her axe presses across its chest to keep it still. It howls, _screams._ She leans down to look it in the bleeding sockets as she pulls her fingers together. She doesn't stop until they touch and the upper edge of the beast's spine gleams through the furrows in its face.

It's poison again this time. She carries the Church's all-purpose antidote, a habit she picked up in Old Yharnam, and she can name every symptom of the snakes' venom. There's no excuse for her dying to it.

She can't remember anything like this happening in the charnel houses, in the old town, in the nightmare, so it can't be that getting stronger has made her overconfident. There doesn't seem to be a reason; she's simply regressed entirely in ability for no apparent cause. Is it something in the fog? Has she been concussed so many times that even the dream is having trouble fixing her? Gehrman would know, but it would be like asking him whether she really should have butchered what feels like a third of Yharnam's population.

Yes. She can't ask him.

She gets a message from Argo asking—of all things—if she's alright, from a few hunters who ask for her help. She sends the messengers back without replies. There can be no poison in her veins in the dream, but her hands tremble. Her chest constricts. She presses her palm over her eye, clenches her hand around the axe's handle, and breathes in moonlight.

(The— the hunter on the tower in Old Yharnam. What did... he say, again? _You still dream, I should think?_ He wasn't sure.

Of course he wasn't.

Her eye starts to ache. Of course he wasn't.)

"Haven't you seen enough of these wretched beasts, freakish slugs, and mad doctors?" What's this about slugs and doctors? "Sentence these fiends to death!"

The Master of the League is too large for the room she comes across him in, or the room is too small for him. He belongs in the woods outside, a weapon in his hand, blood staining his brass-buttoned coat, a bonfire reflecting off his one-eyed bucket helm. "What do you say? Why not join the League?"

She shakes her head, stepping back as if putting distance between them will make the building any less claustrophobic. She can't— won't work with other hunters. She respects the cause, and Valtr's passion for it, but he's... too much.

The door opens. The newcomer's hand is closed in a fist, as if holding something. As soon as Valtr turns his attention to him, the man opens it and stomps a foot down on empty air. He shifts and stomps again a little to the side. "There." Valtr hums, a small, satisfied sound. The newcomer looks up. Aside from his eyes, his mask also leaves his mouth uncovered, which seems to defeat the purpose. "Master, take care. That beast from the catacombs went to ground. I lost its trail." He grimaces. "Thing's near the size of a swine. It shouldn't be so wily."

"I appreciate the notice."

The newcomer considers Asuna. "The hunter that's cleaning up those village wretches?" He doesn't blink much. "Do you know about the Powder Kegs?"

It's a group of some sort, but she hasn't heard anything beyond that. She shakes her head.

"A bunch of shoddy hunters. Their weapons designs were rubbish, but they refused to use anything else, so the Workshop threw them out like the trash they were. After the ashen blood was burned from the old town, they grew even worse. Got teary over filth. They're gone now. No one is mourning. Don't be a Powder Keg."

"Are you suffering from doubts?" She wants to bristle at Valtr's question. A beast's a beast. What's there to doubt? But something about the way he speaks makes it all but impossible to imagine that he could ever be wrong. "You're a hunter, and an accomplished one to have made it this far. Your reasons may be different, but like us, you've discovered that noble, thankless duty, to cleave and burn the rot that's sunk in its roots into humanity. Take conviction from your purpose." His cane taps against the floor. "Nothing out there tonight deserves to live. Those aren't humans anymore, if they ever were. They're nothing but writhing, defiled messes of vermin-riddled flesh. You are not in the wrong."

That was never in question. She knows they don't deserve to live, she doesn't need to be—

She isn't listening to this. For the first time since the beginning, she envisions the Hunter's Mark in order to get out of a situation.

 _Talk to someone_ , Rose told her. The doll. The retired hunter in the village. That should be enough. How many times must something be done to count as a habit? While Gehrman isn't in the workshop, she searches through the piles of books on the floor, but the dictionary doesn't specify.

It's been so long since she didn't know what to do. She sits by the small, unmarked grave where the stillborn infant from the lecture hall rests. When she can't watch her hands shake anymore, she buries them in the lumenflowers and thinks about nothing at all.

She figures out the problem: she's not being aggressive enough. Ever since she— attacked Rose, she's been waiting for the beasts to make the first move to ensure she doesn't commit the same crime. But Rose was... an exception. Most other things that have a beast's traits are beasts. Hesitation is costing her to no gain.

Rose hesitated. Stayed her hand when by all rights Asuna should have died for turning on a hunter. No matter how many times Asuna goes over the memory, she can't understand. That wasn't what should have happened.

She shouldn't be alive.


	17. Hypogean Gaol: Morte

AN: Clarified in the last chapter that she does still keep the augur in her mouth.

* * *

Yahar'gul's a quiet place. It's empty for the large part, no beasts or madmen lurking in the houses and prowling the streets. The only beast is the great big undead lightning abomination guarding the path to Old Yharnam, and Morte has a neat arrangement worked out with it where he doesn't go anywhere near it and in return it doesn't fry him. The only living things he's likely to run into in the area proper are the things down in the gaol, the pigs and hunters and rabid dogs outside, and the ubiquitous sack-carrying henchmen.

Not that he's sure what they're henchmen of, but they just give off that vibe of being _something's_ lackeys. People have taken to calling them kidnappers, he hears. Incongruously tame for a thing that beat him like a landed fish and hauled him bloodied and stunned to the dungeon of some lonely district at the edge of the town. They're the only monsters in the night that he's still genuinely afraid of.

But yes, Yahar'gul's quiet. Several of the big-name invaders used to frequent it, but they _still_ haven't gotten out of the trap. Not that he's complaining, he's just amazed. It must have been weeks since they went in. Apparently when Kayaba says a place is a trap, he doesn't mean that it's an optional area with difficult but not impossible enemies guarding a chest of high-level loot. Morte'll keep it in mind.

There also aren't any confirmed NPCs around aside from the lady in the dungeon who wouldn't talk to him, but he's heard about Heathcliff's vagrant tendencies, so he's not too surprised to find the covenant leader sitting on a stone bench in a small secluded square like he's in a park enjoying a nice day. The man's instantly recognizable by the heavy kite shield propped up against the seat in easy reach.

Morte sits down next to him facing the other way. "We haven't met," Morte says, grinning as the man glances over, "but I know who you are. No need to give me the pitch, I'm not interested."

"Oh? May I ask why?"

He doesn't sound like he actually cares all that much, but it would be a tragedy to deprive him of the pleasure of Morte's voice. (There are few things Morte enjoys more than listening to himself talk, and he figures that if he likes it, other people must too. That's what empathy's all about, isn't it, putting yourself in other people's shoes?) "Well," he drawls. "I'm not sure if you're aware, but you don't have motives. Most salesmen, you know they're selling so they can get paid with hard cash. But you? What are you getting out of this?"

He spreads his arms, tilting his head back. The moon is closer here, radiant in the sky, and he half-closes his eyes so he isn't looking at it directly. "You come from nowhere, offer an irreversible buff with no strings attached under the guise of it being a covenant thing when it's only the League that has something similar, and then, after that, you vanish into the ether, never to be found again. Alfred doesn't like you—doesn't dislike you either, I'll admit, but it says something when a guy that loyal feels _neutral_ about a Church sect." He pauses. "I don't trust you, knight-dono. I think anyone who does believed in Santa Claus as a child."

Heathcliff chuckles. "Dono? I seem to have moved up in the world." Morte was laying the sarcasm on pretty thick. There's amusement in Heathcliff's voice as he says, "The Powder Kegs have their own Caryll rune as well. They call it Mercy. It lets them sense the position of any hunter without the rune."

Morte blinks, turning his head to look at him. So that's how Djura aims. It's the exact opposite of the League's rune, which tells its user the location and condition of other League members. "Alright, you are a legitimate covenant." He taps a finger against the seat. "I'm confused. I thought you'd be a little less blatant about not denying literally anything else I just said."

"We'll never meet again. What would I care about your opinion?"

Cocky asshole.

Stay still long enough in Yahar'gul and you'll start to hear strains of ominous Latin chanting. It's disorientating enough on its own, hovering just at the edge of hearing range and seeming to come from every direction, and then there's what they're actually chanting. There's one person who's made it this far that knows a smattering of Latin, and apparently it translates to— well, Morte doesn't remember the wording exactly, but he recalls it was religious ranting about cleansing sin peppered with "farewell"s.

Typical Yharnam. The village is empty? Of course its residents haven't moved or gone out to watch a soccer game; no, it's empty because they committed ritual mass suicide, or whatever's being implied. Morte kicks his feet, hums along for a few lines ( _eat feet Seymour_ , unintelligible chorus, _aah_ ), then asks, "So what do you want?"

"What does any hunter want?"

Morte snorts, which turns quickly into full-blown laughter. Heathcliff's picked a good place, right up near a wall with all the ways leading to it covered in rubble and rocks that'll sound if anything moves over them, so he doesn't even have to bother to keep his volume down. It's not long before he's outright cackling. Gravel crunches under Heathcliff's boots, and the older man's hand curls loosely around his shield's grip.

"You," says Morte once he can breathe, "are _full_ of shit. But I'm nice. I'll play along. To answer your question: is it A, every hunter wants something different, B, it doesn't matter anyway because you're not a hunter at all, are you, or C, all of the above? It's a hard choice, but I'd have to go with C."

Heathcliff's quiet. Then he asks, "What makes you think that?"

"What, that you're not a hunter? Easy. Doll-chan doesn't recognize you."

"...The _doll_ doesn't recognize me?"

Morte grins. "Isn't that what I said?"

He's still not experienced enough at reading faces to decipher Heathcliff's expression. The man's tone is easy enough to understand, though. "The _doll_ ," he says yet again, not even changing the emphasis. "You talk to it."

" _Excuse_ you, I talk to _her_ , and she talks back, even. Thank you quite kindly for proving me right, though," says Morte cheerfully. "Not that there was any doubt. Naturally." He leans back. "You do what you need to with the other dreamers, I don't care, just as long as you don't expect _me_ to be that gullible."

Heathcliff shakes his head. "Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"Don't you?" Morte shoots back. "The only thing on my to-do list is clothes shopping, and I've done that." He waves his arm, flapping his sleeve about. Say what you will about Yahar'gul, but the armor set the local hunters wear is pretty snazzy. It's cloth, rope, and steel, as opposed to most everyone else's leather fetish. He's not against leather, but he finds cloth more comfortable. The only modification he made was to take out the helmet, leaving only the hood. He figures that if anything nails him in the head, he's dead either way, helmet or no helmet, and this way he at least doesn't have bars across his vision.

In the end, it's Heathcliff who breaks first. Morte whistles, watching him saunter off as if his shield weighs nothing, and then gets up and follows after him.

Heathcliff's scent is viciously alien. Sterile. The only blood on him is the stuff in his veins. There's no way to tell where he's been, no traces of incense or lumenflower or dust. It's not any kind of challenge to follow. And there's no way to mistake the point where the trail cuts off two alleys down from the square.

There's no explanation for it. Just _poof_ , and all of a sudden it's gone from existence. Morte's amazed all over again that anyone's stupid enough to trust the man.

He wanders a bit, admiring the scenery and studiously avoiding kidnappers, before he heads back to the dream and bounces the conversation with Heathcliff off the Doll and Gehrman. Gehrman has some interesting insights about Heathcliff—the old man's not familiar with the Knights of the Blood Oath, which Morte's tempted to take as meaning that Heathcliff made the group up, but there's enough evidence pointing the other way that it more likely just means it's newly formed. Knights in general are apparently a Cainhurst thing, though. If they're with the Church and using shields of all things, they must have severed ties with the Vilebloods. It goes a way towards explaining Alfred's careful lack of distaste.

Morte turns a corner in Yahar'gul and is promptly assaulted by chiming. A bell crone in the area's noticed him. He follows the bell, skirting around a kidnapper, a pair of dogs, and a pig, until he finds the woman by a railing overlooking a wide street. She backs away as he approaches, drawing her dagger as if that'll stop him.

He darts forwards, but the air in front of her goes hazy and he pulls back. He takes another step back when the invader materializes, narrowing his eyes. There's only one invader gauche enough to wear a homebrewed skull mask and dual-wield pistols. Which means...

It's more a baring of teeth than a grin. "I had no idea you were back! Well _done_ , man. Yharnam just wasn't the same without you." The lack of bullets flying his way is a response just as much as words would be. He feels safe enough asking, "Should I expect to see everyone else back soon?"

Darth Gun— alright, Morte can't take anyone with that name seriously. He mentally dubs him Skulliosis for this encounter. It's not much better, but come on, the man dual wields pistols. What's he expecting? If he wanted a decent name, that ship's long since sailed and crashed into an iceberg halfway across the Atlantic.

Skulliosis shrugs in answer. So they've finally found a consistent way out of the trap. Morte knew his faith wasn't misplaced.

Morte steps back, raising his axe and pistol. "Don't suppose I could convince you to shut that lovely lady up."

Skulliosis fires. Morte leaps out of the bullet's path, charges forwards, blocks the next bullet with his axe, and then he's too close to dodge the third one completely. He grits his teeth, pushing through the pain in the split second before Darth Gun's trademark numbness washes it out, but Skulliosis steps back from his swing and effortlessly turns aside from the follow-up bullet. He fires twice, once from each pistol.

When Morte heads back to retrieve his echoes, he's thrilled to see that the bell crone's stolen them. It means he doesn't even need to go out of his way to kill her. He sits on the railing, feet propped on the old woman's corpse, and considers his next move. If the front runners are back, that means they're going to start making real progress again. As much as he respects their drive and effort, he can't let that happen.

Where to make himself the most useful? Darth Gun's ilk have Yahar'gul covered. The Chalice Dungeon is gross and moldy. Morte doesn't have access to Cainhurst—he's on good enough terms with the false doctor after handing over a couple of madmen he collected off the streets, and he doesn't want to jeopardize that by barging into her clinic without permission. Although, since he is on good terms with her, maybe he can simply ask her to give the invitation with his name on it to him? It can't hurt. If she does give it to him, though, it won't change that he'll have to learn something of the castle's layout before he can be productive there.

He nods. Forbidden Woods it is, then.

He co-ops, alternating between summoning and being summoned. He drops a few hints depending on who he's talking to, vague allusions about other players, and offers an echo chamber and cheerful encouragement to anyone who's willing to vent. Close to none of it will bear fruit, he knows, but that's alright. Some of it will take, and even a very few people at the wrong time can do a lot of damage. He's not trying to stop the hunt from continuing, anyway, merely stall it a bit, and it's entertaining either way.

Color loses definition and reforms as a rooftop overlooking a cluster of houses, some of which are burning merrily. There's a pig lying on its side down the street, guts steaming in the mist, and something like a dozen dead madmen sprawled across the ground and over the roofs with probably more out of sight in the houses. Morte wonders what he was summoned for. It seems like the host has the situation well in hand.

He decides to ask. His summoner is easy to identify. He's kneeling on the ground directly below Morte, axe laid neatly on its side in front of him, his head bowed, his breaths coming long and slow and shuddering visibly through his back. Praying? Something on his lap is giving off light, and Morte leans in, squinting. An Insight slug. Is he praying before he eats? Should Morte wait for him to finish?

Maybe he'll hurry it up if Morte lets him know that he's there. He drops down, and his summoner picks up his axe and the slug and gets to his feet, vanishing his bell into his inventory. "I can't tell them apart anymore," he— she says.

Bloodborne is the first true VR, but it's also an M-rated hack-and-slash that was advertised entirely for its combat. All of the women who've made it this far are well known simply for being women if nothing else. It doesn't take Morte long to go down the list. Hunter's axe, Ludwig's rifle, standard Yharnam hunter outfit, hair in a braid down her back, no social skills—

Holy shit. The Pyromancer _never_ summons.

He might be the first person to visit her world. He has absolutely no idea what she's talking about, but he's not passing up a chance like this. "If you can't tell them apart," he says guilelessly, "maybe there's nothing to tell apart in the first place." She doesn't speak or give any indication that she's listening. "Maybe they were the same thing all along."

She shakes her head. Morte asks, "Can I ask why you're having trouble telling them apart?"

"This was a bad idea," she murmurs.

"Wait wait wait!" Morte grabs her hand before she can flick through her inventory, then hurriedly lets go and holds up his hands in surrender before she can decide to eviscerate him. "You're having trouble with something, aren't you? I find it's usually better to talk these things out with someone. Two heads are better than one and all that."

He holds his breath. She doesn't move at all. The flames crackle and spit sparks into the night, a wind blows in the scream of some distant beast, a piece of snake slides down her coat, and she doesn't move.

Morte can't hold back the urge to fidget any longer. As soon as he shifts, she seems to breathe again and tilts her head towards him like she's trying to catch the sound of his movement. "What do you call a beast?" she asks.

Listening to stories about her, Morte's always had trouble remembering that the person in the tales isn't just a character. He's not the only one—even the storytellers, the ones recounting the events they were present for, seem to have the same issue.

But here, standing next to her, he can't imagine having ever made that mistake. She's startlingly, impossibly real. He doesn't realize he's staring until a breeze sets the leaves to rattling and he jerks a step back. He strains to remember what she asked, but the memory doesn't come. The shakiness in his laugh isn't all feigned. "Can you repeat that?"

"What do you call a beast?" As if she didn't notice the pause at all. What's time against something like her?

She can't tell them apart, she said. So that's what she means. Well. There's only one thing to do, if that's the case; he grins. "A monster that was human," he tells her. "If it hurts a person for no other reason than its own satisfaction, it's a monster."

"Then," she says. Stops. The slug twines around her wrist, and Morte waits. She stirs and goes on. "What do you call a hunter?"

He makes a show of thinking it over, but he remembers who he's talking to and drops the pretense. "If it's shaped like a human and kills beasts, then it's a hunter."

"They're not antonyms."

"No," Morte says, "they aren't. Plenty of hunters are monsters. Not just the ones that attack other hunters, either. I'm a monster. I'm only not a beast because I'm still human too."

She nods. "Your name."

"Yosuke," he says because he can't fathom lying to her, "but I signed the contract as Morte."

"You're still human," she says, nudging the slug away from a splotch of blood on her sleeve that's indistinguishable from all the rest. "You're certain."

Though it's not phrased as one, it's clearly a question. "Of course I am," Morte says, and then has to think about why. He doesn't rush. She'll wait for him all night if that's what it takes him. He wishes he could see her face, but her mask is up and her cap shades her eyes. "Because I still enjoy human things," he decides. "Like talking about topics that interest me. Like imagining what the sun looks like and protecting the things that matter to me."

She says, "You're certain," and it's not a question.


	18. Shadows of Yharnam

Asuna might regret if she remembered how to. She doesn't know what she would regret, exactly, between taking her brother's unused helmet from his room and bringing her axe to bear on a girl that was not a beast. Maybe it would be nothing in particular, and the regret would be a nebulous, pointless burden without the grace to tell her which mistake was her greatest. Maybe it would be everything. Everything an equal mistake, piled high and high atop each other until it couldn't tell where to stop.

There's nothing left but the future, the night and the hunt and the beasts still to be slaughtered, and regret is a weight that exists only to drown its victim in the inky past. What stays her course is fury, an incandescent thing of gnashing teeth and lashing claws that burns and roars and screams for the blood she spills in its name, not caring whether it comes from her or the things in her way. It will eat her mind and heart and leave her hollow if she lets it starve, so she feeds it and feeds it and doesn't think about _why_.

The forest gives away like smoke. Past the gnarled trees lies Byrgenwerth, the college that birthed the Healing Church. There's nothing for her there, but that's always how it goes. And. Well. Snakes are starting to bore her. They aren't...

"You listen to ghost stories?"

She drags her axe down to her side. That rasping voice isn't an enemy. He's a hunter. He was with Valtr. And he's not attacking her. He's not an enemy. Save herself for the monsters and beasts.

The older hunter licks his lips and turns away, keeping her in his peripheral. He came from downwind, emerging quietly from the shadows of the trunks and the ferns. The whites of his eyes are bright through his mask, and his teeth when he bares them glint dark with blood. He gestures towards the graveyard at the foot of the college. She wonders at that— but no, it's nothing to be surprised at. Humans die. It's better than leaving their bodies under the moon like she does. "Night of the hunt—the screams of men under the butcher's saw, ash and blood and incense so thick on the air you can taste it, the Unseen Village's snatchers prowling the woods. This graveyard's haunted, meanwhile. Corrupt shadows of some buried queen. Rotted things. You want into Byrgenwerth, you kill them. I'll take the one with just the sword. You get the other two. You're over it, that _empathy_ thing you had going on. And you still dream. You better be able to kill two sodding ghosts on your own."

He strides forwards, tugging his axe's handle out with a _clang._ His back is to her. She taps her rifle's trigger, thinks _why_ , thinks _why not_ , and by the time he's turned through the arch she has answers for neither.

He doesn't smell human, all dry scales and stinging venom and anger tainted through with regret, but what does human smell like? Let one dream and it'll start to smell like a hunter. Let one onto the streets during a hunt and it'll start to smell like a beast. A corpse, if it's lucky. Blank slates that take on the colors around them. There's something philosophical about that. But there are ghosts for her to kill, so she stops thinking and follows the clashes of metal down.

Two black-garbed shadows with swords closing in, one shadow with a mace and handful of flames hanging back and sending out fireballs that turn to follow the hunter. Asuna makes a note to learn how to imitate the trick as she sprints forwards. She slams at full speed into the shadow with a sword and candle, sending them both sprawling to the ground in a heap. It brings the candle between them, pushing the blinding heat into Asuna's face. She recoils, too shocked and disgusted to press her attack, and the shadow shoves her off.

She stumbles to her feet behind a headstone just before a trio of fireballs splashes across the rock after her. She presses her sleeve against her mask, snarling in the back of her throat and trying to ignore the memory of the stench lingering in her nostrils. The hunter makes a harsh rattling sound that Asuna only recognizes as a laugh from the context. He calls over his opponent's shoulder, "Get over it, new blood!" Both the hunter and shadow are bleeding, which isn't right, can't be right, because dead things don't bleed fresh blood. The shadow is dead. It's been dead for centuries. Maggots have eaten its bloated flesh and dirt has scarred its hollowed bones, and yet it's fighting and its body is whole.

She bursts away before the dead thing she tackled can take her arm off at the shoulder. A spray of silvershot staggers it, and she charges in and bites her tongue. Ebrietas's tentacles ram into its chest from inches away, sending it flying halfway across the graveyard. She sprints after it, hanging her rifle at her belt and extending her axe as the shadow impacts a massive headstone with an audible _crack_. While the shadow's finding its feet she swings down to smash its skull open.

She sees the cloth of its hood split at the seams, hears its sudden pained cry, but she's too committed to break off. The snakes that leap from its hood in a burst of gore wrap around her axe's handle to steal her momentum, press their fangs against her padded sleeves and gloves. She bloodies her tongue again. Tentacles push the shadow up against the headstone and keep going, piercing ribs and heart and stone before retracting through the portal.

She turns away as the body hits the ground and growls _Wrong monster_ at the fireballs homing in on her. They waver uncertainly, but the shadow that spawned them is too far away for them to hear over her. When she walks past, they keep their course without turning to follow.

A whistle sounds. Asuna pauses and glances over at the hunter in time to see a snake large enough to swallow a person whole rear up from the ground beside him. He blows on the whistle, short and sharp—so that's why his mask doesn't cover his mouth—and the snake lunges for the shadow with its maw opened wide. The reptile's large enough to cast up a wind with its movement. Asuna's hands tighten slightly around her axe at the whiff of a nightmare, and she turns back to the shadow that's blown another round of fireballs her way.

The flames don't hear her. She ducks behind a headstone, and the fireballs explode in a wash of heat and rubble. That's new. Was the shadow taking her easily before? She doesn't expect much intelligence from a corpse, but that still strikes her as monumentally stupid. Why wait under you're at a disadvantage before pulling out your strongest attacks?

She leaps over another volley, letting them converge and explode behind her, and slams her axe into the shadow's raised mace. It braces its other hand under its weapon, arms trembling as she presses forward, and then ducks and steps to the side. Asuna's axe hits the ground in a splatter of grave dirt. She rolls away, pushing the handle short as she moves, and almost manages to avoid the explosion from the next fireballs.

Ducked behind a headstone, she stabs a blood vial into her thigh and lights a Molotov. She does enjoy fighting in graveyards. Not as much as fighting in the streets, but compared to a cathedral— or perhaps she only sets low standards. In any case, the cover the graves provide is useful. She dashes out before an explosion takes out the headstone and tosses the Molotov.

The shadow slips out of its path, but as the bottled fire passes by its head Asuna says _Burn._ Fire and oil bloom from the ruptured glass. The shadow raises its arm in time to shield its head from the damage. The flames on its sleeve die away, leaving only the half-melted glass shards embedded in its limb. Its snakes hiss, rearing back, and it leaps at her. She ducks the mace swing and bites her tongue.

She's getting predictable. The shadow steps aside from the tentacles, dashes to the right at her rifle's report, and Asuna jumps back from the fireballs, dipping her head to let her cap's brim take the wind and light from the explosion.

She bursts forwards. The shadow's on one knee, both hands in the dirt, red mist tinting the air around it, and there's the barest strain of a chant coming from behind the writhing snakes. She doesn't care what it's doing, only that she doesn't let it finish, but before the axe head comes down on its shoulders something hits her in the side like a spiked battering ram.

She rolls as she lands, is back on her feet nearly as soon as she touches the ground, and then instinct has her dropping to a crouch just before a snake with a mouth lined with fangs would have taken her head off. She couches her axe under her remaining arm and spends a vial before she can bleed out. There's an odd hitching noise coming from her throat. Her first notion is that it has to do with her missing half a lung, but the sound doesn't match.

The snakes retreat into the ground with no dirt disturbed in their passage. Asuna finds the last shadow fending off the hunter halfway across the graveyard. It breaks off and forces the hunter back with fire when he tries to pursue—and there's something inherently perverse about the concept of a hunter retreating in the face of fire, though she isn't sure why. The shadow's chant fills the graveyard, and—

She rests two fingers against the leather over her windpipe, feels for the shudder in her exhale. Oh. Is she laughing?

She returns the doll's greeting with an absent nod, heads up the stairs and rests her hand against the headstone leading to the lamp in the woods. Through leaf-dappled moonlight, past the empty ruins of homes, down the muddied remnants of a river. In the graveyard, the hunter sits on a headstone, tossing a whistle between his hands, his face lifted towards the moon.

His fist closes around the whistle. "You don't use it right. The hunter's dream is a crutch, it isn't a weapon. You can't count on it forever." He snorts. "Not my problem, is it? Master sent me to tell you, I closed the gate to Yharnam. Fool, leaving it open. Not bad enough up there, you need to let the snakes through too? Good for you only one monster used it. The shadows weren't the only things out of the catacombs. There was a beast. Clever thing. You know the kind. Likes to pretend it's human."

She lights the lamp the messengers have placed in the center of the graveyard. Her hand stops just above the glass, close enough that a pane fogs with her body heat. The corpses are still on the ground where they fell. Should she burn them? They were never beasts. Burying might be more proper.

Beasts or no, they crawled out of the grave. If it happened once, it can happen twice. She burns them. The hunter laughs under his breath as the fire grows under her glove. When she starts for the lamp, he slides down from his perch, axe tossed over his shoulder, and vanishes under the trees.

"Could you kill me if I asked?"

The doll's lips part just slightly. She doesn't blink, and it looks for a moment as if her eyes have widened. She crosses her arms, hiding her porcelain hands in her sleeves, before she answers, "I would not. I _could_ not bring myself to harm you. Why would you ask it of me?"

Asuna bites her tongue, lets the trickle of blood pool with saliva in her mouth before she swallows. "I don't know." She turns away, her hands clenching into fists. Bones creak.

Quietly, the doll says, "May I ask a question? If you've no wish to answer, I will not press you. You're avoiding Gehrman, the little ones in the baths, other hunters, and, until now, me. The very last thing I could want is to push you away further."

"No," Asuna murmurs.

The doll hesitates, then takes a step closer. Goosebumps prickle up the nape of Asuna's neck. The doll's hand is cold as a dew-flecked flower on her cheek. "You will hunt beasts... and I will be here for you, to embolden your sickly spirit. For as long as you dream, good hunter."

All Asuna can do is nod.


	19. Cleanse Us

Warning: Implied, off-screen, non-explicit eye stuff. (I mean, this is a Bloodborne fanfic, it was bound to happen at some point. I felt a little uncomfortable writing part of this chapter, though; maybe I'm just squeamish, but I figured you guys could do with a heads-up.)

* * *

It seems that every household has a different formula for making incense, with the people of different areas of the city tending towards different types of materials. It was and still is useful for navigating. She tells herself that, but it's become more and more irritating as the night has wound on. Though it stops the beasts from scenting what its stink covers, that works both ways. When she wakes in Oedon Chapel, all she has are sight and sound.

While she's getting her bearings, Arianna says, "It's good you're back, dear. There's been trouble." The woman's claimed a heavy, high-backed chair near to the lamp in the center of the building. Of the dozen Asuna's brought out of their homes, Arianna is among the few to have given her name and the only one to make a point of greeting Asuna whenever she comes by. Most of the others watch her from the shadows, talking at her only if she comes near.

Asuna turns to her. Arianna clarifies, pale hands settled stiffly in her lap, "Someone's gone missing. Oh, it's hardly a surprise, but— there might be something else to this one. He wasn't seen leaving. And there've been others since." She smiles. It's a wan expression under the carefully applied makeup; there's nothing so tiring as helplessness. "Of course, I understand if you have work to prioritize."

Asuna takes count. Three missing. ...No. Four missing. She sees the keeper of the chapel huddled in his layers of threadbare robes behind a barrier of incense, and beside him she almost recalls a faded impression of another presence. Something small and lonely, misery in the hunched arch of its spine... or perhaps she's remembering the keeper twice over. She's stood in this place in other worlds. She shouldn't be too surprised if they're beginning to overlap in her memory. She shouldn't be too surprised if...

Three, then. And a newcomer, the hunter from the woods. The... retired one. It's a difficult concept still to wrap her mind around. She can't imagine how it could have come about. He's not in the building proper; she can see an arm and a shoulder, and the rest is blocked by a wagon abandoned out front.

Impossible as his existence seems, he's doing well compared to the generally dejected atmosphere of the other refugees. He straightens from his slouch against a wheel when she nears. "I've been waiting to tell you, _thank_ you for sending me here. It's an absolutely smashing place. All these refugees here, they're your doing, that right? Good of you to take some time out of your hunt to help people." He spreads his hands. "Oh, and— terribly sorry to say this, but, that gift you gave me? Well, there was a beast on the way over—actually a whole pack of them, it turned out. I couldn't go back for the cleaver with all the rest of them baying for me blood. Again, I am really very sorry..."

She cocks her head. In one night, she's burned a nightmare to rubble, walked in dozens of worlds, slaughtered hundreds of monsters that were once human and... perhaps some that were not monsters at all. After all that, it's this man, a hunter who abandoned his duty and his weapon, that she can't begin to understand.

She can ask: why he left; how he left. He might not answer, as hesitant as he is when it comes to speaking about himself, but she can ask. She doesn't.

If an answer exists, she's no desire to hear it. It would be too tempting to ensure that she can never follow him.

"Ah, I did say I'd repay you. Here," he rummages through the pockets of his ragged pants, comes out with a handful of paper-wrapped marbles each about a third the size of a human eyeball, "from me own stash. Real prime stuff, useful for a hunter on the job." He rubs his chin. Dried blood crusts his beard. "The Church banned them forever ago, but the charlatans making the rules don't know how it is on a night like this for a lone hunter."

She takes the pellets and peels back the wrapping on one. When she skims a thumb over its surface, dark powder clings to the tip of her glove. Blood, plainly. She doubts Yharnam has any demand for plant-based drugs. She won't use it, but she passes it into her inventory in the spirit in which it was given.

"And this." A saw-shaped hunter badge. "I hope you don't mind that I plucked it off a corpse. I figured you'd have more use for it than its old owner."

Since he hasn't mentioned it, she guesses that he didn't notice the people who have gone missing. Unlike the keeper, who, going by the broken, quiet sobbing, definitely has and isn't taking kindly to it.

Asuna generally deals with crying by killing the ones doing it. She is the least qualified thing in the room to talk to him. He cares so much about people who she doubts have ever considered returning the sentiment, and it makes her deeply uncomfortable for reasons she can't put words to. She'd rather stay her distance.

But he might have noticed something. However he does it, the keeper pays attention to his charges. "Miss hunter," he says, and she crouches on the balls of her feet so he doesn't have to crane his neck at such an uncomfortable angle to face her. "I don't know what went wrong. They're _dead_ , killed, all of them, and— and— I just don't _know_. Did a beast— or could someone from outside have—" He stumbles over the words while Asuna turns over what he said. _Dead_ is not the same as _missing_. It's concerning, losing three of the scant dozen sane civilians she knows for sure remain in Yharnam, but having bodies to start from will simplify the process of tracking down the culprit.

It's a faint whisper of a memory, but... if she'd known someone else to think that thought before tonight, she remembers that she would have called them cruel. Monstrous, even. People are dead. She has no cause to be looking for a silver lining.

That's sentiment, though, the thinking of a girl who's never put a bullet through a man-shaped beast sprawled helpless and pleading at her feet. She'll use their deaths because the alternative is to let their murderer continue its course unchecked. It's pragmatism, nothing less. Why is she thinking about it at all?

"It's all my fault," the keeper says. Asuna narrows her eyes, trying to picture the train of thought that could have possibly led him to that conclusion. She doesn't even know where to start.

"No. The bodies are?" Something about her enunciation sounds off. Since the words are clear, she doesn't dwell on it.

Two of them are out the left doorway, which leads to the more residential areas of the Cathedral Ward, and the third is nearer the former hunter along the path directly up to the Grand Cathedral overlooking the ward. All of them are fairly close to the chapel. She starts with the first two, an elderly man and a boy who couldn't have been older than five, grandfather and grandson. She puts down the dogs nosing at them and looks what remains of them over. There isn't much left between the dogs and whatever got to them first.

As she's heading back inside to examine the other body, movement at the edge of her vision stops her. She looks up, and the host of the nightmare looks down from where it clings to the side of the chapel.

No, it's not the host. The head is different, with tentacles, and... it's something she can't put words to, but it doesn't have quite the same sense of presence as the host did. A lesser version.

Lesser or not, her hackles rise at the sight, at the implicit threat in its existence. Its arms stretch easily from the spires to the street, a full three stories on a building with unusually high ceilings. She thumbs the rifle at her waist, very seriously considers shooting at it right there—reluctantly, though, she lets reason take over. She knows how it would act if it was about to attack, and it's not acting that way. And it's holding most of the sane population of Yharnam hostage. She can't risk them.

She can't. No matter how much she wants to. It's hard to remember why, with the creature hanging over her head so close it could reach out and grab her, but she knows she can't. That's enough. The reasons don't matter.

Still, it rankles when she has to walk under it to enter the chapel again. Its attention is focused on her, but it makes no move to challenge her, and then she's inside with a roof above and the thing from the nightmare a single wall's width away.

The third body is more intact, but the culprit was clever enough to take advantage of the incense wafting from the chapel to mask its scent. Frustrating. It does give her something of a time frame, since the hunter must have arrived after the woman was killed to have not noticed at all, but that's about as helpful as knowing the victim's name would be.

Crime dramas were never her preferred genre, but she watched a few episodes over her brother's shoulder as a child. They were more focused on entertainment than fact-checking, but the broad strokes probably at least resembled reality. Find suspects, determine the motive and method.

The suspects include half a town's population. The motives were hunger and bloodlust. The methods were head trauma, a torn throat, and claws slashed across the chest.

Forget it. She'll just kill everything in the Cathedral Ward.

As she stalks the streets again, it's startling at first how easy it is. She can remember how much trouble she had with the beasts here in the early hours of the night, but after the villagers in the woods, she honestly can't figure out how she could have ever considered these beasts difficult to deal with. The giants that earlier patrolled the central square and the main thoroughfares are all asleep now; it's a simple matter to take them out before they fully rouse. The robed things neither beast nor human have picked up some new abilities while she was gone, wreathing their weapons in cold fire and casting odd homing bolts with their lanterns, but it's not enough to make them a challenge.

That's despite what Asuna's done to her axe. She pressed a gem into the blade that makes it bursts into flames when pressure's applied to it. Unlike paper, which lights the surface it's rubbed against on fire, the gem actually converts the metal directly into flame. She's essentially turned her axe into a pole that happens to occasionally light on fire on one end.

It's extraordinarily inconvenient. She's having to relearn how to use her axe, the smell of cooking fur and meat is nearly as bad as incense at covering other scents, and burning something to death takes more effort than simply caving its skull in. And they always scream; she can't stand it.

It's that much more satisfying when they fall silent.

She follows a beast up to a roof and watches it knock a rain barrel over to get at the water inside. While the beast desperately scrabbles at the puddle spilled across the iron, Asuna smashes her axe's haft into its head. In what's long since become a thoughtless habit, she crouches beside it to refill her empty vials. It's not until she glances down that she remembers she's been avoiding mirrors.

She lets the vials slip back into their folds in her pockets. In her first concession to sanitation in a long while, she wipes some of the blood off her glove in the water first. She tilts her face up, away from her own reflection, and aligns her fingers against her eye socket.

She blinks a few times afterwards. Then, biting her tongue with just shy of enough force to draw blood, she looks at her cupped hand. Strange. She thought there would be surprise at the very least, but there's just an empty space under her eyelid and darkness in what should be her peripheral.

The Hunter's Mark carries her back to the dream. She passes the doll by without a greeting and heads up the stairs to the workshop. When she steps inside, setting the augur on her cap, Gehrman is by the door leading out to the Insight bath, thumbing through a book with his gaze fixed distantly on the far wall. He closes the book and sets it on one of the piles on the floor as she crosses the distance between them.

"Could you kill me if I asked?"

He raises an eyebrow. "I am not going to kill you."

She shakes her head. "Could you?" she repeats.

"Well, that's a complicated question," he says softly. "Tell me why you're asking."

She hesitates. Some part of her hoped he would simply answer her and agree to her request without delving into the reasons, but of course even if he did she would still have to let him see. Somehow, having to tell him feels more like failure than seeing it herself did.

But there's no getting around it. She takes her cap off and meets his eyes.

Gehrman tuts, his hands tightening around his cane. "Is that your answer?"

"If you take my eyes out, will they come back the next time I dream?"

"No, they would not," he says. "So long as you accept it without doubt. But you understand that nothing would be solved. If the cure was as simple as that, Yharnam would be a different place."

"I understand," she says. And she does. She's not going to—

Ah, there comes the surprise. The first physical sign of the plague occurs in the eyes. The pupils distend, bleeding out in irregular blotches into the surrounding iris. She's seen it a thousand times in a thousand faces, but it still has the potential to catch her off guard.

She's never once questioned that she would make it through the night. Having such a basic fact as her own existence torn away from her wasn't something she expected to happen.

"I have to kill the beast at the chapel." After that... she doesn't know. "I apologize. I can't end the hunt."

"Don't be sorry, Yharnam isn't your mess. It isn't fair that you should have had to clean it up. Whatever your reasons, you tried; no one should ask any more of you than that." He sighs. "Come here."

* * *

Totally unrelated omake: Hats

"I figured it out!"

Argo sounds as smug as Kirito's ever heard her, which more concerns him than anything else. "Figured out what?" he asks carefully. She's taken her hat off. Without it casting ominous shadows across her face, she looks nearly innocent. Yes, he's definitely wary.

She clasps her hands behind her head. "What's the one thing every mad hunter has in common?"

"Is this a trick question?"

She wrinkles her nose. "Oh, I'll just give you the answer. And if you ever tell anyone I gave you information for free, I will murder you. Slowly. There will be mistreated kitchen utensils involved." He mimes sealing a zipper over his lips, and she grins, all teeth. "It's _hats_."

Kirito opens his mouth. Closes it. Turns the word over in his head, wondering how he misheard it. Says finally, "What?"

"You're a smart kid, Kiri-bou—"

"You're like five years—"

"—you can't," she plows on, "tell me you haven't noticed! Our hats _never fall off_. Why is this? What possible explanation can there be?"

He raises an eyebrow on principle, but when he goes back over his memory he realizes that he can't think of an instance when his hat fell off. Rolling fails to leave it in the dirt. Getting smashed through a lamppost recently by another player's Gascoigne didn't dislodge it. The wind from explosions and barely-avoided blows only makes the brim rustle dramatically. She... might actually be onto something.

"Let me enlighten you!" She crosses her arms. "Our hats are clearly aliens from beyond the stars that drive us mad by cramming eldritch knowledge of things man was not meant to know into our brains. In light of this, I will never wear a hat again. Especially not a top hat. Truly, they're the worst of evils." She nods decisively.

"...Argo," says Kirito, "how many of my cocktails did you drink?"

She snorts. "I am perfectly sober, thank you. You can't gt drunk off of _blood_ , anyway, it isn't a damn fruit."

(He checks the cupboard in the workshop later. It takes a moment for him to notice that one bottle is a half-inch less full than the others.)


	20. Christmas Interlude (non-canon)

**AN: This is not the actual ending. This has no relation to what the actual ending will be.** Think of it as a possible but not likely future.

I just got the game, and I want to play through the DLC before I write anything more for this story. That might be a while. So until then, you're welcome to this weird spin-off flash-forward thing. There might be a continuation? Or there might not be. Depends on how merciful the bosses are feeling, really.

* * *

"Onii-chan, breakfast!"

No response.

Suguha lowers her fist and steps back from the door, biting her lip.

Normally, she would let her brother sleep in. He likely only went to bed a few hours earlier. A week ago, though, he'd told Suguha and their parents that he made plans for today and wanted to be woken up at a normal time if he slept late. A simple request.

Footsteps thud up the stairs. "He's asleep?" her dad asks. Suguha glances over at him, and he nods and raps his knuckles on the door. "Kazuto!"

After a minute of silence, Suguha says, "I'll get him." Her dad backs away as she opens the door.

It's bright inside. Though the window's been plastered over with a liberal helping of duct tape, another shred of tape locks the light switch to _on_. Her older brother is slouched in the chair in front of the computer, head resting uncushioned on the desk and strands of unruly dark hair spread across the keyboard. The monitor, at least, has turned off on its own, so he must have fallen asleep sometime before the last half hour.

He's wearing the same outfit as yesterday, a dark grey long-sleeved shirt and black pants. The harsh light washes out his already pale skin and adds in a yellow tint for good measure; against it, the dark bags beneath his eyes stand out like bruises. He's been home for nearly a month, and yet he's still thin under his rumpled clothes, skin stretched over bone and the stringy beginnings of returning muscles.

Quietly as she can, Suguha crosses the room while her dad shuts the door behind her. Just out of arm's reach, she stops, breathes in, and shouts, "Kii-bou!"

He's up. He's on his feet at the second syllable, taking in the bed, the light in the ceiling, and Suguha forcing herself by an effort of will not to take a step back. A second later, his eyes clear. "Suguha. Did I fall asleep?" He looks at the clock on his desk and frowns.

"It's eight in the morning. The sun's about to come up," Suguha says. Her brother abandons trying to parse the electronic numbers. "Breakfast is downstairs. You should eat."

"Thanks for waking me up," says Kazuto. The frown doesn't entirely slide away.

"You wanted to go out today, right? It's Christmas."

His eyes widen. " _Oh_ , that's right! It's— right." His smile is a small thing, barely more than a quirk at the corner of his lips. Suguha's heart clenches, a tightness and a phantom pain.

She turns away. "When did you want to leave?"

"Uh." Suguha winces. Her mouth opens to correct herself, but Kazuto's already answering. "Before noon."

"That's the time you said you'd meet up at, right? There was a safety issue with the subway, so transportation's going to take longer. The line that'd be easiest to take isn't running. We'll have to transfer once, and then it's a bit of a walk from the station." About thirty-five minutes total, but she wants some extra time. In case. "How does ten-thirty sound? That's in two and a half hours."

"That sounds great."

Before, breakfast was her and Kazuto—their mom packs hers up to eat at work in the minutes before her shift starts, and their dad usually collapses into bed as soon as he finishes cooking. They're not a family unused to inconvenient sleeping schedules. Even on weekends, their dad still sleeps like he's working night shift.

For the past several years, it's been just Suguha. Lately, even she's taken to packing it up and eating it for lunch instead.

Kazuto, of course, skips it. Their dad wakes up around two or three and makes lunch from yesterday's dinner leftovers if Kazuto's awake then, which he is about half the time. Her brother's only regular meal is dinner. Considering the state of his body, that really shouldn't be allowed to be the case, but the three of them simply don't have enough time to take care of him like he needs.

He comes downstairs as Suguha is digging rice out of the pot. He's changed out of yesterday's clothes. She fills a second bowl for him and joins their parents at the table.

The table feels crowded with the four of them. "When are you leaving?" their mom asks.

Suguha looks over at Kazuto, then says, "Ten-thirty. We'll have time to get there early."

"Are you sure you'll be alright? I can go with you if you want."

"I'm only going to meet a friend." He doesn't seem annoyed at her concern. Suguha would be if everyone she knows treated her like something between a land mine and a porcelain doll for a month. She leaves some edamame in his bowl. "Chew," she reminds him just as he swallows a bean whole. He's gotten much better about it, but he still forgets when he's doing something else at the same time. "There's no danger," he says. "And Suguha will be there the whole time."

"I know," their mom says. "But if anything happens, if there's any complication, call us, alright?"

Nobody asks the question three of them are thinking. That's not unusual. Suguha's becoming accustomed to the holes that spot every conversation that happens in the house. There are things they don't talk about, and, as much as they pretend otherwise, all of them know it's not for Kazuto's sake.

Sitting on her bed with her back to the wall, a pair of headphones over her ears and her laptop balanced on her knees, Suguha spends a lot of her time watching videos and reading articles about Bloodborne survivors and the government researchers studying them. So little of it gives her what she needs. The researchers, as much as they're trying to, don't—or, as she's starting to think of it more often as, can't—understand what the players went through while they lay in their hospital beds for two years. As for the survivors, the only ones who consent to being filmed or photographed are the ones who didn't _do_ anything.

There are four transcripts of full-length interviews with players who actively participated in clearing the game. Three are incomprehensible: the players used nothing but in-game jargon which, when asked about, they only knew how to explain through more in-game jargon. One of them was extremely terse with their answers on top of suffering from a language disorder that had them misinterpreting about half of the interviewer's questions. The notes at the beginning of the transcript identify it as aprosodia, which in that player's case meant inability to express or interpret emotional rhythms in speech. Though Suguha hasn't been able to find the numbers, it's apparently unusually prevalent in the Bloodborne survivors. Evidently, it can manifest as a rare symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The player interviewed in the fourth, though, clearly struggled to give their answers in a way a non-player could understand. As a result, they couldn't go into detail, but even the broad strokes were enough to paint a picture clearer than any report or research or study has managed.

It was strange. Suguha read the words on the page, but it was her brother that she saw in the white spaces behind the characters. Halfway through, she closed the tab, pressed her laptop shut, and went to bed.

She doesn't want to look at the taped-over light switch in her brother's room and know that it's because he's used to darkness being a hiding place for monsters. She doesn't want to notice him reach for his waist at the shrieks of playing children and know that it's because he expects there to be a weapon hanging from the belt he isn't wearing.

She wants the brother who sits on the porch with a bottle of cold water ready to toss to her when she finishes kendo practice, who smiles at her jokes and talks to her about new video games and software breakthroughs and things she doesn't care about but listens to anyway because he's the one telling her, who can only speak in muffled grunts every morning until he has breakfast. She wants the brother who doesn't get sick at the taste of meat, who can glance at the sky without flinching, who she doesn't have to call awake with a stranger's name.

Gold dusts the blinds. Kazuto shovels down the last mouthfuls of rice and goes to put his bowl in the sink. Their parents watch him until he clears the landing. No one speaks until the door clicks shut upstairs.

Their mom says, "Suguha."

Suguha smiles, then picks a slice of fish for her bowl to cover how quickly the expression falters. "It'll be alright, Kaa-san. I won't let anything happen."

She nods. "Make sure to call in before you go."

"I will."

"Do we know who he's meeting?" their dad asks.

The empty chair next to Suguha feels like it takes up the whole room. "A friend, he said," their mom says into the quiet.

"He wasn't seeing anyone before."

"No, he wasn't," says Suguha, trying to pick a single grain of rice from a clump stuck together. "I asked last week after he told us. He said it was a friend from Bloodborne."

"Oh," says their mom. "Well, it's good that he's ready to go outside during daylight again." She hesitates. "Suguha—"

"I _know._ I promise to be careful."

Japan isn't the most accommodating country for people with mental health concerns, but the Bloodborne Incident is such a high profile case, and the thousands of survivors' conditions are so clearly utterly debilitating, that popular support for helping them reintegrate into society was relatively high at first. Before people really began to realize what being a Bloodborne survivor meant, the government, friends and family of the survivors, and therapists and psychologists interested for humanitarian and academic reasons arranged counseling for those who would be talked into it.

When the initial attempts didn't garner noticeable results, someone had the idea of organizing a support group in the vein of Alcoholics Anonymous. Since people who hadn't been through Bloodborne couldn't empathize well enough to help them, then maybe the survivors who had suffered through it together could help each other.

It worked. There wasn't much improvement, not so soon, but the organizers were optimistic. The survivors who went were reported to be more open to social interaction and more motivated to recover. Suguha remembers their dad suggesting that they get Kazuto to go once the group grew confident enough to branch out to Tokyo.

The next week, two players who actually made it out of Bloodborne's starting area went to a meeting. They knew each other from the game, and not as friends.

Suguha's hand tightens around her chopsticks. "Onii-chan isn't like that."

"Obviously he isn't." Their mom chases a crumb of rice around the rim of her bowl. "It's not Kazuto I'm worried about. Well, it is, but not over that. I know you can look after yourself and your brother, but— sorry, I'm just repeating myself now."

"If he's meeting this friend on Christmas," their dad's still caught on that part, "they should be on good terms with each other. And Suguha's going. He'll watch out for her."

Some of the tension around their mom's eyes eases. "That's right."

There are things they don't talk about, and all of them know it's not for Kazuto's sake.

The dishes go in the sink, the leftovers are packed into the refrigerator, the table's wiped off. Their dad heads off to bed, their mom to the sofa in the living room to watch television. Suguha hesitates, considering whether to join her. There's a stillness to her expression that means her attention's not actually on the screen, though.

It's the Yule event in Alfheim Online. The Sylph hometown is decked out in lights and mistletoe. Ice sparkles emerald and ruby off the leaves and flowers of the trees. Snow covers the domed buildings and the ground off the roads. More than a few Sylphs are taking advantage of the hometown damage immunity to have snowball fights without all the pain and mess of having them in the real world.

Suguha sets an in-game alarm at ten o'clock, then pings Recon. The other Sylph agrees to meet at the north gate.

With school being off, there's more traffic than usual at the gate for a weekday. It takes a moment to find her classmate from the air. He waves up at her, and she touches down on the roof. "Good morning."

"Hi." Belatedly, he adds, "Good morning. How's your Christmas going?"

She shrugs and sits down next to him, hanging her legs over the side. "I only have a few hours. I'm going out later."

"Really!"

"My brother's meeting with someone. I'm going with him."

"Oh. That's."

"Weird?" she finishes. She shakes her head. "Is there something happening here today? I didn't check the bulletin."

"Not today, but everyone's saying there's going to be a raid boss tomorrow. The Valhalla spirits have been showing up closer to the hometowns." He pauses. "I can't help but feel like RECT Progress is misinterpreting the Norse myths a little."

"Who cares? It's just a game."

He flinches. "Leafa-chan—"

"Where's the nearest spawn point?"

"Ten minutes' flight out."

"Thanks."

She's not sure whether to be surprised when he follows her. "I didn't think you'd log on today," he says over the high note of their wings. His voice carries clearly. The wind's not as loud as it would be in real life at their altitude. "Are you going to have enough time to finish your essay?"

"I'm mostly done, I just have four paragraphs left."

"...It's a five-paragraph essay."

"I'll get it done," says Suguha.

The rest of the flight is quiet. It doesn't last long. The Valhalla ghosts can't fly, which they compensate for with a plethora of long-distance attacks and a ridiculous aggro range. Suguha sees the arrow flying at them, then the ghost an instant later glowing a pale purple impossible to miss against the snow.

Her wings have fallen in volume and pitch. She can't stay in the air much longer. While Recon strafes to the side, she drops under the arrow and dives for the enemy on the ground. The ghost catches her rapier against his greatbow. Rather than push against a physically stronger opponent, she leaps back, incanting a spell that she casts as soon as her feet touch ground.

He topples under the gale. Recon comes down on him, adding the force of his fall to his strike to take out a good third of the mob's health bar. Suguha readies the spell again for as soon the ghost finds his feet; he resists it, but it still staggers him for a second that Recon uses to cast a damaging spell.

Between the two of them, the mob doesn't stand a chance. Suguha presses out of the loot screen and kicks off from the ground before the motes of light from his death completely dissipate.

"Wait up!" She hears Recon chant a speed buff. "Leafa-chan, is there anything I can do to help? If you need to talk to someone, I'm here to listen."

Suguha slows for a second, letting Recon come up beside her. "Are you sure? It's actually pretty silly."

"It can't be silly if it's bothering you this much."

"You don't know that," she says without heat. "If I tell you, you won't ever say anything about it to anyone else?"

He shakes his head. "Of course I won't!"

"Of course you won't," she repeats. She brushes a strand of yellow hair away from her face, presses her fingers against the side of her head. She breathes in, closes her eyes, and breathes out. It's easier when she isn't looking at him. "Did you know that I have a brother?"

"Not until today," Recon says.

"It's been a long time since I've had a reason to bring him up. He left a few years ago."

"And he came back a month ago."

Her eyes widen. "Yes. He did."

Recon scratches his cheek. "I didn't notice it back then, but in retrospect, it makes sense now. You seemed happier for a while. Then, a week later, you— crashed, I guess."

"It was that obvious?"

"Not really. I mean, I talk to you every day at school. I'd be a terrible friend if I never noticed."

"That's when you started texting me."

"I didn't know how to ask about it, and I wasn't sure if you'd _want_ to be asked, so I tried to be a distraction. It wasn't enough."

"Don't say that. Those mobile games you recommended helped. It's not your responsibility, anyway. It shouldn't be. And the reason for it all is silly," she says. "My brother didn't contact us while he was gone. He was busy, it wasn't his fault. But he came back, and I guess I thought he'd be the same person as when he left. I would still recognize him. That's what I thought."

She comes to a full stop. Grassland struck through with glittering rivers and dotted copses of trees rustles silver and green in the breeze far below. Heights don't worry her anymore, but the vertigo she escaped while moving catches up to her and takes her breath away. Ahead, Recon startles and turns back to rejoin her.

"He's my brother," she says. The wind is quieter. Her voice sounds hollow without it filling the cracks. "He's the same person that he was when he left. Sometimes, I think I do recognize him. But I can't treat him the way I used to. Even though he's the same person, I feel like I have to be someone else to be around him. It might be selfish of me, but I don't want to change who I am for a reason I don't understand."

"That does sound bad," Recon offers.

"I don't want him to leave me behind. I'm trying to understand, but if I had a hundred years to do nothing else, I still don't think I would be able to."

"Could you ask him?"

"Probably. He might answer. I'd have to spend time around him to do that, though, and it's hard. Just being a room down from him with a wall between us, it doesn't feel like enough distance. And at the same time, it feels like too much distance. Even when I can see him, there are times when I have to remind myself that I'm not going to lose him like that again. I want to know what he's doing every second of the day, but I can't stand being around him."

He blinks. "Is that why you're going with him on his date?"

"Hey," she says sharply, "no one said it was a date."

"Oh, sorry. It's Christmas, I kind of just assumed."

"No, you're right. I shouldn't have snapped at you. Sorry." Recon's eyes flicker over to her wings. His are dimmer as well, the sparkles less prominent. She gives it another two minutes before they have to land. "He's going to leave the house for the first time since he got back." Recon frowns, but he keeps quiet. "He smiled when he talked about the person he's going to meet. I've heard him laugh, but I can't remember the last time I saw him smile before that. This person I don't know, he's _important_ to my brother. He might be more important to him than anyone else. When they meet, I'll be an intruder. I want to be there, I want to know what kind of a person can understand my brother, but I also don't, because I know that person won't be me." She rubs the back of her neck. "I'm such an idiot. I can't even decide on why I'm complaining."

"That's not— I mean, it sounds like a complicated situation. It makes sense that your feelings are too. I think."

"It doesn't feel that way," says Suguha.

When the alarm pops up under her status bars, she's amassed a good stock of event materials to trade in later and practiced her kendo forms on more unlucky mobs than she's bothered to count. "If I was in your place," Recon says while she's going through the menu, "if someone from my family... I can't imagine what it's like, but I know I'd be handling it much, much worse. I don't think you should be ashamed for being upset."

She leaves the menu open at the log off button. "I don't have a right to be upset. My brother's the one who couldn't come home. It's not alright that I'm making this about me."

Slowly, Recon says, "This might not be an accurate analogy, but I think the people waiting outside the operating room are usually the ones the most scared. That shouldn't be wrong."

The last thing she sees before the dark inside of the visor takes over is Recon waving to her with his brow scrunched and his mouth still half open from his goodbye.

* * *

"Yes, I'm calling in for Kirigaya Kazuto. He's going outside today. Kirigaya Suguha, his younger sister. I'll be with him. Fifteen. The curfew's that early? Sundown, I know— no, I understand, thank you. Yes. Ten meters; we'll be careful. Thank you, you too."

She slips the phone into her purse and looks up. Kazuto's sliding his jacket sleeve over a clunky bracelet. Suguha scoops the other half of the pair out of her pocket and turns it around in her hands, fingers brushing softly over the small button on the outside. There's no chance of pressing it by accident, since it only registers five clicks in quick succession. She snaps it closed around her left wrist. It locks snugly in place, tucked close enough to her skin to sense her pulse without being uncomfortably tight. She has no way to take it off on her own.

"Are you ready?" she asks Kazuto once she's slid gloves on. He nods and stands up from his bed.

Their mom has a large project at work that she took a few hours off from so she could see them off. When they come downstairs, the blinds are closed, the television's off, and she's hovering by the door. "If you need sunglasses, I can get them from the car."

"That might make it worse," says Kazuto.

"If you're sure," she says. "I'm going to open the door. If it's too bright, tell me and I'll take the rest of the day off and drive you."

She clicks the lock open, turns the knob, and Kazuto breathes in sharply as wan winter sunlight creeps through the widening crack. The cold that follows it is a secondary thing, barely notable. Suguha watches him, watches the fixed stare and the fingers curling uselessly at his waist, and watches him open his mouth and say with only a slight tremble, "Do you have—"

"Umbrellas. They're in the cupboard. Should I get one or two?" Suguha asks, already turning.

"Two, please. Sorry."

"It's fine, onii-chan." It only takes a minute to dig them out of the back of the cupboard. Suguha steps out the door first, opens one, and holds it out to Kazuto, who takes it as he follows her. Suguha opens her own. Even with mittens, the cold will numb her hands by the time they reach the subway entrance.

"Take care," their mom says. She doesn't close the door until after they've turned the corner and left her behind.

Frost crunches beneath them. Kazuto keeps his head low, his eyes on his shadow and Suguha's feet. "It would be easier if the sun wasn't out," he says. "I don't remember it being so bright."

"It's supposed to get cloudy later."

"Clouds?"

She hasn't had to explain something so basic and self-evident to him in weeks. It catches her by surprise. "The things in the sky," she says, fumbling, "the white—"

"I know what they are. What do they have to do with the sun?"

"When the wind blows them in front of the sun, they cast shadows."

"Oh, the _sun_ ," Kazuto says. "I was thinking of— that makes more sense."

A woman passes them. She seems to take it merely as him making room for her on the sidewalk when Kazuto moves close enough to Suguha that their umbrellas overlap. And perhaps it's the sunlight bolstering Suguha, or the scarf that hides her face, or her brother against her in their own island of shadows—however it happens, when the impulse comes to ask, this time she doesn't have the heart to fight it down. "Onii-chan," she says, quiet against her pulse, "what was that woman to you?"

"A stranger."

She waits, but he doesn't say anything else. "That's all?"

"Why do you sound—" He's fumbling, as surprised as if she asked him what a cloud was. She spins around, walks backwards a few steps so she can look at him, look for traces of the familiar in his angled bones and stark skin and dark eyes. They're easy to find. He's still her brother, still Kazuto, and some part of her has always thought her brother infallible. She couldn't consider that maybe she's just as unfathomable to him as he is to her. That maybe the lack of understanding goes both ways.

The only difference between them is that he's been trying to fix it.

"Please. Explain it to me like I'm five."

"I don't know how to." He clutches his shoulder tightly with his free hand, one of the nervous tics he didn't have before. "Anyway, it must be a Yharnam thing. Maybe just a hunt thing, even. It doesn't matter here."

"It matters to you," Suguha says.

"It shouldn't. I didn't spend the whole night trying to end the hunt just so I could keep on being a hunter when morning came. This isn't what I fought for."

"When you woke up," Suguha says, "when the hospital called to tell us that you were awake _—_ I wish I could go back to that moment. You were awake, you were safe, you were going to come home. I was so happy. You know I've been playing a VRMMO. I imagined what it would be like if I was trapped in Alfheim for two years, how it would feel when I beat the game and came back to reality. The graphics would take a pretty long to get over—ALO's art style is kind of... watercolory, it's nice to look at but there's no real detail and things start to fade out at a distance. I'd miss the menu, and I'd miss flying, and I'd miss having a status bar to tell me when I hurt myself. It would be hard to get used to having to eat at normal times. To not have magic, to look at someone and not be able to tell immediately what they're skilled at and who they're working for. I'd have to get used to being tired again, to needing to use the restroom. Homework and school would be so difficult. I'd be so used to having freedom that the routine would be stifling.

"I thought I knew what coming back would be like for you. And then I saw you again for the first time." Heels of his palms pressed over his eyes, huddled on the hospital bed as he cried over the death of a girl he didn't know the name of. "That's when I should have realized that things would be different."

Kazuto laughs; Suguha whips her head around to stare and stumbles over a crack in the sidewalk. "I was one of the better ones. If I hadn't been distracted, I would've noticed sooner that I was in a _hospital_. There's no way Kayaba didn't have that happen on purpose."

"What?"

"That's how it began. You woke up on a gurney in a clinic." He shakes his head. "I'm sorry. I am trying, but it still can't be easy for you to deal with—"

Suguha cuts across him. "That's not what I mean! What I'm trying to say," she hesitates, taking the moment to put her words in order, and then goes on, "is that I was wrong about nearly all of it. And _I_ haven't been trying to fix that. When you don't understand something, you ask. I don't. I want to get better about that, so if I don't understand something you say or do from now on, will you explain it for me?"

It's a few seconds before he responds. "What made you decide that?"

"I— shouldn't have had to decide it. It's something I should have been doing from the beginning. I can't help you if I don't know what you need help _with_."

"Suguha, thank you," he says, "but I never want you to understand what a paleblood sky means."

"Okay," says Suguha, "so, then, not anything big, like what you just said, but can you tell me about the things that make you act the way you do, at least?"

He hesitates again. After a moment, he says, "Ask me. I'll decide whether to explain."

"But—"

"Suguha, the best thing would be for you to have never heard the name Yharnam, but that ship's sailed. I'm agreeing because you're right, I'll be easier to handle if you know what's likely to set me off."

"I'm not trying to _handle_ you. Why are you talking about yourself that way?"

"I'm under no delusions about what I am," Kazuto says, "or what this is." He holds out his arm, the lump of the bracelet barely visible under the puffy sleeve. "Though the irony does chafe. So go on. Ask."

"Onii-chan, you're not like that."

"No?"

"You're _not._ You wouldn't—" She gestures, trying to encompass the words caught in her throat. "You wouldn't."

"You couldn't tell the difference in Yharnam," he says. "NPCs, mobs, players, they all looked the same. There were people who said they could tell them apart by smell, most of the time. I wasn't one of them." He chuckles. "The only real difference I could ever find was that the native hunters had more personality. They were better at fighting, too."

This is one of the first things brought up in the interviews, generally in the fashion of the survivor talking about the NPCs like real people and the interviewer having to interrupt them to get them to clarify. Like with most of the other issues the survivors have, it mainly only applies to the players who cleared the starting area.

The fact that the NPCs apparently had the capability to do plot-relevant things without any consistent trigger or player input did nothing to help break the illusion. Two of the interviewed survivors knew of other players who had that happen to them, giving accounts of NPCs who soloed bosses the players hadn't gone anywhere near yet or getting involved in sidequests outside of the areas they were programmed to patrol. Suguha's seen someone claiming to be a survivor say that an NPC outright _cleared the game_ for them without any prompting on their part, but she didn't do any research into whether it was true or not; she was too busy being outraged over the asshole in the video it was a comment under, who spent the better part of an hour deriding the survivors for being attention-seeking idiots for expecting no one to call them out on their blatant lies about what the game was like.

"Yes, but there are no NPCs here. Everyone's a real person. You know that. And there aren't invaders either. No PvP."

"You're right," says Kazuto. "I do know. I'm trying not to forget."


	21. Beastly Idiocy

AN: I'll post the continuation to the last update when I finish it. (It's just a two-parter, so that'll be it.) That might be more than a few months, though. I'll try to get it done, but it's not a priority.

This chapter's summary: Wherein Asuna messes up so badly Gehrman actually facepalms.

About last chapter's ending: I really don't like having to explain story-related stuff outside of the story. It feels like a cop-out. If something's important to the story, then it should be _in_ the story, and if it's not, the writer should probably fix that. But in this case, this author's note genuinely is a cop-out on my part, so I'll explain both what happened and why I wrote it so poorly.

What happened at the end of last chapter: Gehrman took out Asuna's eyes permanently.

Why it was written so vaguely: I didn't realize until I got there that I did not want to write that scene. At all. It needed to happen, and in fact it was one of the only events that I had planned from early on, but I just didn't want to write it. People murdering each other? Sure, sure, I can write that, no problem. A girl going through assisted self-mutilation in vain hopes of holding off a terminal illness? Eh... I read and watch much worse than that all the time, but apparently actually writing it myself makes me want to look away. Go figure. So, there was a gory discretion shot there, as well as earlier when she took out her eye herself to look at the pupil, both of which were entirely for my own sake. Sorry. I'd really like to change it to make it clearer, but I don't think I can bring myself to.

Other stuff: The Amygdala mess gave Asuna a huge lead—she's been squandering it, but she's still slightly ahead progress-wise. So nobody has reached Rom yet. It, uh, will be _very_ obvious when somebody does.

3/11/18: Added in a mention of Heathcliff.

* * *

In hindsight—

Well. No.

In another life, Asuna might have been a leader. She might have walked with care into her battles, kept just as much attention on her enemies' life forces as on those beside her and moving at her order, pulled back anyone, including herself, who dipped from healthy green to flashing red. She might have had friends she would laugh with, a young man she would have died but not killed for, a clever, affectionate girl who looked up at her as if she was all the stars in the sky and called her _mama_.

It couldn't have been called a kinder world. In its own ways, Aincrad would have been as cruel as Yharnam. The players would know the way home, would know for certain there _was_ a way home—and they would know that, no matter how vibrant Aincrad's colors, it would all be just a very well-wrought dream. Every achievement they accomplished would happen because their captor allowed it of them. When they made it out, nothing they had built up over their imprisonment would come with them in any form. And that was if a single miscalculation at the wrong time didn't tear it all away in an instant without them ever having the chance to make it so far.

No one who might have known the sub-leader of the Knights of the Blood Oath would recognize the hunter who shoots a dog off its feet and stomps on its head while it's snarling winded on the ground. But they come from the same roots, flourished in more or less comparable circumstances, and there are some things that don't change so easily. In any world, Asuna's never been one to dwell on the past after she's taken what she can from it. She doesn't have enough imagination to come up with infinite what-ifs and fantasies, and she's never considered that a bad thing. She goes over mistakes, finds the moments where she erred, then, their lessons exhausted, she sets them aside and rarely gives them another thought.

There won't be hindsight. As far as she'll be concerned, there's no lesson to be taken from what happens.

Or maybe just no lesson worth learning.

The other reason is because here is where her memory begins to obviously, unambiguously falter.

There have always been small things—maybe she doesn't remember killing quite so many once the rush of the fight dies down, or she looks around and realizes she has only a vague idea of where she is and how many steps it took to get here. Sometimes it's the other way around, experiences added in instead of missing—a constant hackle-raising scent that lingers even when she's alone, voices and words in her memories that she can't recall the sources of. Dismissable, all told. Nothing that affects her work.

It's the acknowledgement that exacerbates it. Before, she could rush over the cracks without pause, but aware as she is now of what they're symptoms of, she starts to catch over the leaps in her logic, to stop when she makes an assumption that, though she knows it to be correct, she can't name the source of.

She knows what she shouldn't and doesn't know what she should. It's— not something she wants to think about closely, but she'll reach for a blood vial, she'll hesitate for an instant too long when her hand closes around empty glass that she never doubted was filled, and... this _does_ affect her work.

Which wouldn't be an issue except for the fact that time has become a factor.

Being able to take two or three solid hits at most before going down has beaten into her a fine understanding of how little she can afford mistakes, but mistakes do still happen. She doesn't mind them, even. Tracking down the ones that killed her and setting the same fate on them makes for a diverting change of pace from the usual meandering exploration.

But time matters now. Errors are too costly to allow. The leeway she had is gone, and that knowledge presses down with a physical presence, wearing at her and leaving her snapping at every shift of the wind. She tears through the Cathedral Ward with all the wild desperation of a wolf with a leg caught in a steel trap. Nothing stops her. At some point, she gets into a fight with three dogs, five beasts that still remember how to use tools, a lantern-bearer and a scythe-wielder, and one of the large, ragged, man-shaped things that haul around sacks filled with what feels like lead weights. Only the latter gives her anything in the way of trouble, and she comes out the other side of the melee without taking so much as a scratch.

She's always taken more care when dealing with beasts that were hunters. They're the most dangerous, the ones that kill her the most. She's never put any real thought into it before other than noticing it as a fact, but she catches herself on her axe after nearly slipping on blood-slicked cobbles and thinks about how she must seem from the other side.

Dully, she wonders if the beasts still feel fear.

None of the people she's killed were human but became a beast the moment they stepped onto the street. It's not an instantaneous metamorphosis. If she had a timeline of any of their lives, she wouldn't be able to mark the point when they, as themselves, stopped existing. It's more like falling asleep than dying, in that sense.

Maybe Asuna will wake up at the end, and the her of tonight will have only been a dream to the girl in Tokyo. And maybe someday a shiny prince in armor will ride in on a pale horse and a road paved with glitter to bail her out of a losing fight, like in the stories her father told her when she was young. She rolls her shoulders. Even odds, really.

When her circuit takes her back to the chapel, another woman is dead.

The retired hunter is bent over the corpse, liquid and gobbets dripping from his hands and beard. She purses her lips. Well, there's any scent trail gone. Couldn't he have waited to destroy the crime scene until she went over it?

There's something about that thought... ah. The woman died near him. There was no need to preserve the body for her, since he must have noticed what killed the woman in the first place.

He stills when she draws near. She stops and waits for him to finish, fingers tapping a rhythm she's never heard before on the handle of her axe. Before the tune loops, he says, getting to his feet, "You, heh, caught me at a bad time. This isn't what it looks like." His voice sounds deeper than she remembers, rougher, almost with an echo, but she ignores the discrepancy. She trusts her memory about as far as she can throw it.

The words are more important, anyway. She's... not sure what it looks like, but she's fairly certain about what the situation is: he's eating a corpse. Odd thing to feel the need to lie about.

"I found her like this," he says. "Leaving the chapel—she must've gone mad. It's the curse of Yharnam. Incense can't ward off the night forever." He pats his hands dry on his pants. "Oh, but I got some more. Here."

She stows away the pellet he hands her, then draws her mask down. "You didn't stop her."

"I was three blocks away. I rushed back here when she screamed, but..."

"Where is it?"

"What, her killer?" he asks. His laugh is a throaty rumble. "Good thing, isn't it, that this is your first night. The Church could have used a hunter like you. What've you been doing? Did you try to kill everyone in the Ward, hoping you'd strike lucky on one of them?"

She nods, and he laughs harder. "He went up. You could check the Grand Cathedral, see if he's there. If he isn't, might be that someone you off on the way is the one you wanted. Good luck. Not that you look like you'll need it."

The Grand Cathedral is empty. The shaggy beast's arm still lies undisturbed where she left it.

She returns to Oedon Chapel, and to Arianna's corpse.

The body is whole. Asuna pats it down, searching for the mortal wound, and finds a crushed throat. Her death was entirely bloodless. That can't be, though. Beasts don't kill like that. Was it something different this time? One of the robed things with staves?

"...I was three blocks away," the retired hunter says. He's standing close enough behind her that she has to move to the side before she can get up from her crouch. "I rushed back here when she screamed, but."

It's not anything in the Ward, is it? Central Yharnam, maybe, if it climbed a wall to bypass the chapel and then... the Ward seems more likely. A hiding place she missed, or simple bad luck that means their paths haven't crossed. She hasn't killed everything here yet. Not even close. Hundreds, but Yharnam's a city; it has—had—a population in the hundreds of thousands at least.

She can't go on whittling them down like this, one by one by one. There's not enough time in the night.

If she sets the Cathedral Ward to the torch, she'll burn out survivors too. She knows better than to think she's managed to gather every remaining human. And it didn't work, when the Church consigned the old quarter to flame. Old Yharnam was sealed off behind a bottleneck, and still they failed; if she tries to repeat it in the Cathedral Ward, it's an easy matter to flee to Central Yharnam. In Old Yharnam, the rot survived where the healthy perished. Beasts are the only thing down there now. The same would happen in the town above.

But... harmless beasts. Creatures terrified of flame. Monsters that flinch and cower under light. If the Cathedral Ward burns, she won't get all of them, but she might get most, and the ones that remain will be less than worthy prey.

"What will you do?" the retired hunter asks.

She takes the lives of every potential survivor and weighs them against the chance to stop any more of those under the chapel keeper's eye from dying. She factors in that they're not likely to survive the night on their own with the way things are going, not unless they have a tidy stockpile of incense like the chapel does, and if she hasn't found them yet there's an even chance she won't ever find them at all.

She turns away from the corpse. Through the lamp in the chapel, she returns to the dream. "You're shivering, good hunter," the doll says after her greeting. Asuna pauses. Is she? That's strange. She's not poisoned. "Is it cold?"

Asuna shakes her head.

Even if it is now, it won't be in a bit.

In the workshop, she asks Gehrman, "How do I make gunpowder?"

"What do you want to know that for?"

Somehow, it still surprises her every time he asks her _why_. She has to sort her thoughts into order before she can answer. "To burn the Cathedral Ward."

Gehrman sighs. "Tell me what happened."

She explains about the chapel, the keeper and the survivors, and about the deaths. She explains about how they've still been dying despite the numbers she's culled. Gehrman asks for their manners of death and the identities of everyone in the chapel, so she tells him those as well.

"You saw nothing strange in his devouring a corpse." His voice is muffled; she thinks he's talking past his hand. When he next speaks, though, it's clear: "You've been to the valley hamlet. You must know that burning the Cathedral Ward wouldn't solve your mystery. Asuna, you..."

The floorboards creak as he leans back in the chair. "Have you met other hunters in Yharnam?"

She nods.

"Earlier in the night," he murmurs. "Who?"

"Eileen—she targets mad hunters. Alfred, a Church hunter. Heathcliff; he uses a shield. Valtr, the Master of the League. ...A League hunter." _A hunter in Old Yharnam_ ; the words she doesn't say linger bitter in her throat.

"As well as your summoned compatriots. The Church hunter, which part of the Church does he serve?"

She doesn't remember if he ever told her. She describes his uniform instead, and Gehrman says, "Logarius. ...That is unfortunate. You've come across no others?"

She shakes her head.

"Oh dear." He taps his fingers on the cane's handle. Stills. Sighs. "I could tell you who the culprit is. But I cannot help you."

Bemused, she says, "If I know where it is, I won't need gunpowder."

"No. I suppose you wouldn't," Gehrman says. "Regardless, I am not going to tell you either of those things."

Asuna's mind skids to a halt. He's not going to... but he said he knew. Why would he—? He's _Gehrman_. He's always helped her when she could bring herself to ask. Now, when the clocks have finally stuttered back into motion, he's...

He laughs. A small sound, little more than a huff of breath, but she realizes suddenly she's never heard him laugh before. "Don't see this as a betrayal. It would be better for you to forget about Oedon Chapel."

Asuna makes a sound in her throat, a word that doesn't quite make it past her dry tongue. She swallows. Her own saliva feels thin and weak after growing used to the augur, but it's enough for her to rasp, "Five people are dead. A boy. Arianna..."

"Do you think yourself capable of saving those remaining? Do you have have an idea where to begin looking for the murderer?"

"...Cathedral Ward. Central Yharnam."

"That's nearly a quarter of the city, hunter. You won't find him like that."

"Him."

"Yes, him. Does knowing that help?"

"...You knew, once I told you what happened." If Gehrman could reason it out just from her explanation, then there should be others who can do the same. The other hunters in Yharnam have lived through hunts before. They're more experienced than her. One of them might know of a type of beast that can kill while muddled by incense.

Actually, did it kill while affected by incense? Now that she thinks about it, it seems like the beast lured them out somehow. All of the deaths happened outside of the chapel, and no one inside witnessed anything odd. That doesn't make sense, though. No one sane would walk willingly into a beast's clutches.

...No one sane.

"What about it?"

"I can..." She pulls her thoughts back to the present. "...ask someone else."

"That's a dangerous quality for a person to have, not knowing when to stop. It's especially so for hunters. Go too far, and someone else will lock you away if you don't destroy yourself first. Asuna, have you heard of the hunter's nightmare?"

"No."

"I didn't think you would have," Gehrman says. "You said there was a Crow in Yharnam? Find her. Tell her about the chapel. She can lead you to the one you're looking for."

When she's made it to the doorway, Gehrman speaks again, softly. The words don't make sense, not in that arrangement. She puts them out of her mind.

~o~o~

 _"For what very little it's worth, I will not forget your name. There's never been a hunter before you who burned so magnificently so quickly."_

* * *

Omake - the murder mystery SAO episode, as it would be with canon Asuna swapped out for this version (the first couple of lines are quotes from the episode):

Asuna: The obvious conclusion is that the challenger stabbed the victim with that sword, put a noose around his neck, and pushed him out the window. Wouldn't you say?

Kirito: But nobody had a «Duel Winner» notification.

Asuna: That's impossible. The only way to hurt someone in a safe zone is through a duel. Do you remember who was watching? We'll need to round them all up. One of them must have done it.

Kirito: If someone's found a way to PK in safe zones—

Asuna: What? That's silly.

Kirito: But the «Duel Winner» notification didn't show up on anyone, so it can't have been a duel.

Asuna: You must've blinked and missed it. Come on, you take the north side of town, I'll take the south. No one leaves the area until we find the one who did it. And if the murderer won't fess up to it, we'll get lucky eventually if we just kill all of the suspects. If that doesn't work, we can go through the rest of the town's population. We're solving this murder one way or another.

Kirito: ...Asuna.

Asuna: What is it?

Kirito: Please write a hardboiled story someday. I can't see it being more than a page long, but it'll be an incredible one page.


	22. Abhorrent Beast

She tracks Eileen down in the expansive sewers beneath Central Yharnam. Asuna cut a path through them earlier that evening, but there will be rats and bloated corpses in Yharnam long after the town is burnt and abandoned. The bodies she follows are fresh. For a relative value of fresh. They're recently killed, anyway.

Did the place always stink like this? She can smell barely anything past the heavy shield of sewage. She plunges through the passageways as quickly as she dares, counting entirely on ears and instinct to keep her alive.

From the other end of the tunnel, a voice echoes over her splashing footsteps. "Oh, it's you," Eileen says. "I didn't expect to see you down here. The sewers stink too much for most hunters to stay for long."

Asuna stops a few feet away, turns her face away a little to tug her mask down and remove the augur, then pulls her mask back up before she can take a breath of the unfiltered rot. She says, "Gehrman said I should ask you for help."

"I don't recall him being so chatty," Eileen says. The feathers of her cloak whisper against each other. "Well, go on then."

When Asuna makes it to what the retired hunter told her after the fourth casualty, Eileen interrupts her. "Stop. After you found him cannibalizing a corpse, your response was to ask him for directions."

"Yes."

"...What were Gehrman's words exactly?"

Asuna tilts her head slightly, thinking back. "'Find the Crow. Tell her about the chapel. She can find the one you're after.'"

"Alright. Why didn't he tell you himself?"

She shrugs.

"...You can give me a guess at least," Eileen says quietly.

"He didn't say."

Eileen sighs. "No matter. I would tell you to stay away, but this is your mess. You can come with me to clean it up."

"My mess?" Asuna asks, turning as Eileen strides past her.

"You're the one who let him know about the folks at Oedon Chapel."

She trails after the older hunter, who slows to walk beside her. "It's my fault?" She tries to remember having ever led a beast to the chapel, comes up short, and tries harder. Did she ever...?

If she did, does that mean she killed those people? Through negligence, not intent, but— or perhaps... She doesn't know. She doesn't know.

"You really don't have any idea," says Eileen. "What happened to you?"

She doesn't respond. She can't. She doesn't know what Eileen is asking.

"It's the beggar."

"What?"

"The one that's been hunting those people," says Eileen, "it's the beggar. The man you found eating a corpse."

"No," says Asuna.

"How was Gascoigne when you found him?"

"Dead."

"Did he talk?"

Just sounds. Noise shaped into a facsimile of meaning. "No."

"Not one word?" Eileen asks.

Asuna shakes her head.

"He liked to talk on hunts. He would pretend the beasts could hear him, and it gave him focus when they pretended to respond. He thought that the people don't die when the madness takes them. They're only lost, so there are ways to guide them back, at least for long enough that they will know they're being avenged," Eileen says. "He was one of the worst idealists I've known. Even if he was right, the last you should hope for is for your opponent to collect enough of its wits to break its patterns. But he wasn't fully wrong. The beasts don't leave all of their humanity behind when they turn. That much we know. Some of them keep more of it than others. Rarely, we find one that can go as far as to pass itself off as human."

Asuna says, "No."

They turn down a side passage. Something moves in the water ahead, though between two hunters it doesn't get to stay that way for much longer, and then the steps of the metal ladder at the end clank under Eileen's feet. Asuna follows on autopilot.

Eileen's wrong. Or lying. Beasts can't pretend. Gascoigne—the graveyard beast—it made the right sounds, some of them, but it wasn't human. Asuna knew from the moment it looked at her that it wasn't human. The other former hunters she's taken down have been the same. From a distance, at a glance, they can pass. Like a shadow can seem alive in the moments between sleep and waking. But that's all. They're not right, in the end.

What makes a beast is its actions. A human is something that enjoys human things, like... A beast can't act human any more than a dog or bird or rat can. If a beast acts human, then... then it's not a beast. The person who called it a beast is wrong. It's not complicated. It shouldn't be complicated.

If there's no difference. If one can't find a difference. If beasts can pretend they're human, and... and if humans can act like beasts. Then what's the point of all she's done? What she's killed, who she's helped. They're not the same. She knows they're not. They can't be.

She's judged too many fates to be allowed to be wrong. She isn't wrong.

She can't be wrong.

If—

No. She can't be wrong.

"That's him, is it?" Eileen asks when they're presumably in sight of the chapel. Asuna slows, feet leaden, and Eileen reaches their retired counterpart before her.

"Bollocks," the man says, and chuckles as he backs away several steps, pace easy and unhurried. "You had me fooled. I really thought for a little while there that you didn't suspect. It was the whore what did it, right? You were fond of her. If that's the right word."

"Don't, Asuna," Eileen says. Asuna stills, hand halfway up to her mask. "You need your hands free."

Asuna doesn't think she could take the augur out anyway. She's shaking too much. Her fingers are clammy, heavy and prickling as if waking from sleep. She tastes bile in her throat and swallows it back down.

She breathes in, and it's beast fur she smells even though there's no wind to carry the scent. Is she imagining it? Has it always been there, and she's never noticed before? Has she noticed before, and forgotten?

"How many of you are left?" the man asks. "There's just the butcher and the dying one in the woods. Not even real hunters, those two. It's hard for me to imagine Yharnam's faring much better."

"Shut your mouth," Eileen says. "Asuna—"

He cuts across her. "You don't judge me. You're not better than me."

There's something hot and sour unfurling in Asuna's gut, choking her lungs and pressing against her rib cage. She hugs herself, hands clawing at her sleeves, and tries to breathe through air that's turned as thick as mud. She might break apart if she stops. Animals are all so much meat and blood and bone when it comes down to it, the same on the inside whatever their outward differences. If she falls apart, if she hacks herself to pieces, she knows what her ribs would look like, knows the sound her liver will make when it splatters on the cobbles and the rich, sweet stink of her heart.

"Stars," Eileen says from a great distance away. "You're trying to argue with me? You're trying to _argue_ with me?" She laughs, harsh and brittle as her namesake. "What a night."

"You think I wanted this?" His voice has thickened to a rumble. "You think you're better than me? Better than every damned person in this city? Have you grown that arrogant? We're all monsters here, you bloody crow. You just got lucky enough to not look it. So _don't judge me_."

"I'll judge anything that goes about devouring children."

"Oh, that's rich! You slaughter hundreds, and then you make me the villain because I get peckish sometimes. What about that one out in the woods, the Beast Eater? It's alright when a hunter does it, that it? Or the Church? You know the rumors about the sort of thing they get up to in the upper ward, crow?" he snarls. "If you're that concerned over children, you might look at the one behind you. There's a beast if ever I met one, and it's all your handiwork. You trained her to kill and then hung her out to fend for herself. For a half-dozen blood pellets she handed me a trick weapon and showed me to this place. She didn't give half a damn which of them inside I offed before I got the only one that's willing to talk to her!"

Oh.

Asuna chokes on nothing. Her legs seem suddenly insubstantial under her, and she falls hard to her knees.

"What," he says. "Did— did you really not know?"

Footsteps, then Eileen settles into a crouch at her side. The older hunter's hand is cool between her shoulders even through the layers of blood and leather and cloth. "Hush. You're not at fault."

She's not at fault. Who is, then? Him, a hunter gone mad, a mindless beast, a twisted and completely lucid human? She laughs. Ragged, hiccuping, bordering on sobs, but laughter still. She doesn't want to, there's nothing here that's funny, nothing except for everything, but she'll die if she doesn't make some sound, and this time, she thinks, she won't wake up again.

That's fine. That's all fine. She knows which way is forward now. She staggers to her feet, shaking the crow off, calls her axe to hand, and charges.

Wind rushes by. She reverses direction before a paw the size of her whole body can break her against the ground. In the brief window at the end of the swipe, she extends her axe to crash it down on the beast's claw.

She laughs as she dodges aside from its retaliatory swipe. The smell of burning fur is making her giddy. "I'm a killer!" the beast roars over the crackle of electricity across its back. "What does that make you? You sick puppy," it slams the ground, and she stumbles mid-attack as lightning crawls up her legs, "you're rabid."

She turns the fall into a clumsy roll. It's not enough to avoid the next slash, but the beast has to abort the attack to brace itself on the ground when the crow takes a chunk out of its thigh.

The weakness lasts a bare instant, and then it recovers enough of its balance to leap. She throws herself aside and realizes she wasted a movement only when it comes down nearly atop the crow instead. Claws screech against steel. The crow breaks off with a grunt, but the beast follows up, at least until the younger hunter gets in behind it and sets its hind leg on fire with an axe swing.

It turns nearly on a dime. She avoids most of the attack, but the trailing electricity catches her, her muscles seize, and she stumbles as she's getting out and hits the cobbles on her back. She never has liked fighting hunters with far too much bolt paper for their own good. It's more irritating than anything.

"Like a pack of wolves," the beast growls. She bites her tongue on the guess that it's going to bring its claws straight down, and she's proven right when it snarls as the tentacles shove the blow aside and knock it off balance. She rolls to her feet, staggering a little at the lingering static, and without waiting until she's fully steady darts forwards to get another blow in. The fire's not catching on its own, something about the beast's fur killing it and making it burn out too quickly, so this time she reaches out to the flames as she's retreating and lends them her own strength.

The beast swears and jumps away, putting distance between itself and the other two. It batters its limb against the ground until the flames wisp to nothing. She can't save a fire from that sort of assault. "Fire magic. They let you call yourself a hunter? And you still think you're different than me?"

She rushes in and lands a solid blow to the chest. It tries to grab her, she ducks between its legs and lands a hit on its heel as she goes, and then a kick sends her tumbling. She turns the landing into a roll, already injecting blood to heal her shattered ribs and organs as she finds her feet, and closes in again. It swipes at her, but she's inside its range, far too close to it for the attack to connect. She rams her axe into its gut and backs out before it can step on her.

It doesn't have time to do anything about the fires before the crow is occupying it, landing a flurry of slashes on its legs with her twin blades. She dances away as it swipes at her, and Asuna comes in behind it while it's not focused on her.

It falls, its feet and legs having taken too much abuse to hold its weight. It hunches on the ground, head bowed between its arms. "Die, die, die!" The electricity hissing and spitting across its back rises to a shriek.

Its head is finally low enough for her to hit. She's too close to be sure about her chances of evading the attack it's charging up, so she rushes in instead of trying. It's not hitting her with anything if she smashes its skull in first. (And, if there's no difference between them after all, what does it matter which of them is the one to die?)

A gunshot sounds from the crow's direction, and the beast flinches with a yelp, the gathered electricity fading. It lashes out wildly, too sudden for her to change direction in time. She practically runs right into the swing. It sends her flying, and when she impacts the chapel wall her spine breaks and her skull cracks.

She's dazed, adrift. With an effort, she pulls herself back to reality. She doesn't know how badly she's injured. Below her neck, there's only a void where there should be pain to tell her what needs fixing. She can barely breathe.

The next sound she hears once her ears stop ringing is the crow's voice. "Quite the piece of work. Where did you find that one?" Her bones knit together, and feeling creeps back up from the rest of her body. She pushes herself upright against the wall as the needle pulls out of her thigh. "This should be enough."

The crow stands and moves back. She's breathing heavily, her feathers caked with her own blood and the pretender beast's, a faint undertone of char and ozone lingering about her from electric burns. "He's badly wounded. I'll hunt him down, only... a short rest first. As for you, what was that? He would have struck you with lightning. Were you trying to die?"

Sounds and sounds. She pulls her axe into her lap, into both hands, and gets to her feet. The blood hasn't burned out the pain, but pain is just background noise, a thing that would be pointless if it wasn't such a useful tool for telling her whether she's still alive. And even that's muddled. If she's hurting, she can only be alive. If she's not, she might be alive, or she might not be. Fifty-fifty. Flip a coin. Whichever side lands up doesn't matter because it's all the same piece of metal.

The axe head scorches the cobbles where the crow stood. She throws herself aside to dodge the crow's blade, pushing the axe's handle in as she goes, and her foot pivots and she rushes forward, swinging.

The crow shoots her. She stumbles, and before she can recover there are claws inside her.

She realizes immediately what's going to happen.

She's already injecting a blood vial as the crow's claws wrap around her heart. Then the crow yanks her hand back, and Asuna fights through the rising dizziness and white noise long enough to empty two vials directly into the gaping wounds in her chest.

The heart beats dully in the crow's hand while Asuna slowly, carefully gets back up. She spends another three vials to be sure. "...Keep using them like that and you'll run out of blood vials sooner rather than later," the crow says. Asuna's heart falls with a quiet thud to the ground. It stinks something awful, red and rich and rotting. She presses a hand to her neck and feels the faint but strengthening thrum of a pulse. "You don't have to do this. No one will blame you if you stop now."

They're all the same, aren't they? And she's been killing beasts from the start, hasn't she? She's not doing anything different. Just cleaning up the streets. More thoroughly. So she doesn't miss anything again. No more pretender beasts. No more beasts, no more hunters. Monsters, all of them. Isn't that what she is? Humans don't like hurting, beasts don't like hurting, but pain is all that tells her she's alive. She's a monster after all.

She should stop pretending too.

It's the ugliest battle she's ever fought. She's faster and stronger, but her weapon swings more slowly, and the crow, unlike Asuna, can actually take a hit. She also has decades of experience over Asuna. Decades of experience fighting human-shaped enemies, while Asuna has spent the night putting down full-blown beasts.

Asuna lets go. She calls on every attack she knows, chains them together with thought for nothing but lethality. With each swing that she misses she leaves a little bit of herself behind, and the flames feed on her and catch willingly on bare stone. When she runs out of blood vials, she starts cauterizing her wounds. She's not lacking for fire to do the job with. Half the square is burning. She's come off worse than the crow, but the longer she stays alive the more she controls the field. She's not immune to the fire. It burns her too, if not as deeply. She just doesn't care.

The fires nearest the chapel part as if something's moving through them. Nothing that was in the chapel is a threat, so she ignores it. She lets the crow slice her deep so Asuna can grab hold of her and keep her in place long enough to call on the augur, but the crow twists her arm out of Asuna's grip and sidesteps the tentacles. Asuna blocks the next slash, turns the parry into a downward swing, takes another cut down her arm and retaliates with a rifle shot that catches the crow in the side.

Before she can follow up, the thing from the chapel reaches her. She fires at it without turning, but it doesn't even pause or make any acknowledgement of having just been shot at point-blank range with a rifle.

That she doesn't ignore. She dodges away, but the thing speeds up, overtakes her, wraps around her, and with a jolt she remembers the lesser host clinging to the face of Oedon Chapel.

Its head is the most vulnerable part of it. She guesses where it is, aims, fires, and—

—its fist closes.

* * *

 **The end.**

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.

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(jk. This really is the halfway mark, though, or at least a major turning point. I never thought I'd get so far when I started writing this thing, but here we are.)


	23. Hunter's Nightmare: XaXa

Shouichi thinks at first that he's woken up. Yharnam can't have this many people and this much movement gathered in one place. The people outside have finally cracked the code, the nightmare is over, they're back in Japan, and Bloodborne was nothing more than a long and fleeting dream.

It only takes a moment to remember that people on the streets in Japan don't typically go around hacking at each other with the unwanted child of a threaded cane and a saw cleaver. He doesn't know where he is or how he ended up here, but he hasn't left Yharnam. The crushing relief at that realization leaves him physically weak, staggering and light-headed.

Before he thinks to recover, he gets shot in the face.

He's definitely in Yharnam.

His helmet takes the bullet. The shooter must be far enough away that the projectile's lost most of its impact by the time it reached Shouichi. Just a little bit of blood will get rid of the impending headache. It makes its point clearly, though. He needs to find a defensible position before something comes after him in earnest. Hunters fighting each other, fighting beasts, fighting dogs—a solid dozen bodies just on this one street, and if the roars and shouts and clashes of metal are any indication, the same is happening all around. It's an absolute war zone. As much as he's tempted to find the one that shot at him, Shouichi wouldn't survive getting dragged into this chaotic melee. His specialty is one-on-one duels, not whatever this is supposed to be.

He backs into an alley, slow and careful to keep from drawing attention. Once he can only see a sliver of the street, he turns and shimmies up the wall, protruding bricks and the cages protecting the windows providing handholds. He hauls himself onto the roof and stays crouching as he looks out over the landscape.

Nightmare, it has to be. There's the bulbous sun, the clouds obscuring it making it look oddly reminiscent of a clock—intentional, he knows, just as everything in this world is—and there, crawling over the roofs, connecting some of them and forming ramps up from street level, is the pale rock with the swirling, unnatural pattern that he's only ever seen in the nightmare frontier.

If that was the frontier, does that make this the interior? He doesn't have any information at all, but it's such a compelling theory that some part of him is already accepting it as truth as soon as he thinks it.

He can't die before he finds a lantern. The last he remembers, he was following another empty staircase into another abandoned building in Yahar'gul, and then, with only the foggiest of transitions, he was here. He doesn't trust his ability to find his way back here from Yahar'gul. And _here_ is— he has no clue where here is. Not even the Rat knows about this place. He can't risk being thrown out before he has a surefire way of returning.

As he makes his way over the roofs, he realizes he recognizes parts of this place. A statue's placement on this street corner is familiar; the shape of this alley sparks a memory. It takes him a while to figure it out, but when he does he stops in astonishment.

He's in the Cathedral Ward. It's been a while since he visited—it feels that way, anyway, so he just assumes it's been—but he can't mistake it now that he knows what to look for. The Cathedral Ward's just inexplicably turned into a nightmare populated by more hunters than beasts.

He stops for a moment to appreciate the view of some hunter on the street getting torn apart by dogs with spikes through their heads. Completely unexpected or not, he's not complaining. This is new. There's a story here, a good reason for what's happened, and he trusts he'll find hints of it as he goes along.

If this is the Cathedral Ward, the nearest lantern's the one at the Grand Cathedral. But he adjusts his course for Oedon Chapel instead. He'll see if the lantern there's lit, and then he'll head down to Central Yharnam to mark how far the changes have spread and hear what Iosefka has to say about what's happened. Maybe check on Adella too, the nun he rescued from the depths of Yahar'gul's gaol. "If Iosefka thinks she's stable enough for a visitor," he mutters.

The fighting isn't confined to ground level. The roofs are noticeably calmer, though, and have more open space to maneuver while retaining just as much cover through the rock formations. He makes his way cautiously but not fearfully through the Ward, avoiding the enemies as best as he can.

He doesn't completely succeed. He drops down onto a roof bordered with spikes, nearly right on top of an enemy hunter who was lurking in the shadows out of his line of sight. The enemy doesn't react at first, but Shouichi's more prepared and is already aiming.

Shouichi's strictly average at melee. It's a little impressive in that his basic competency extends to every type of weapon he's ever gotten his hands on, but that's not exactly a useful skill. Basic competency won't get him through a fight against the upper tier player hunters, and it definitely won't get him through a fight against a native hunter.

His strengths are in sneaking and firearms. Unfortunately, those strengths are mutually exclusive—the moment he fires a gun, he can forget any dreams of stealth. With how densely packed the enemies are around this nightmare Cathedral Ward, he can't risk drawing attention with gunfire or getting into a fight where he'll need to be mobile and has a high chance of straying into other enemies' paths.

That's what the case was until very recently, anyway. The hunter who put up two weapons in the messenger shop has since turned to making tools instead, namely silencers for the pistol and rifle spear.

The Rat always thought it was a player making them. She was proven right, to no great surprise. Since she put up her guidebook, which contains a list of the names of every hunter with a bell, the hunter responsible messaged her to claim credit, though he asked her not to reveal his own identity. A shame. Shouichi would like the chance to use the tools on their creator.

The hunter jerks at the first shot that hits his shoulder, then the second shot takes him in the head and that's that—

—except that's not what happens. The hunter _vaporizes_. Shouichi flinches. Scenarios run through his mind of a new status effect unique to the area, another enemy he didn't see that one-shotted this one before Shouichi could, or maybe it's a suicide attack and breathing in the fog will kill him.

The bullet that should kill the hunter passes through the fog without disturbing it, and then it turns back into a person swinging one of those segmented cleavers down at Shouichi.

Automatically, he tries to get out from under it, raising a pistol over his head to try to at least soften the blow when it's clear he's not going to make it in time. The gun hits the roof along with half his hand, and he barely manages to bite back a scream as he turns and runs. He's too close. He has to get out of melee range.

He loses the guy eventually by tripping into a chimney. What the hell, he'll take it. He manages to avoid cracking his head open getting out of the fireplace, then uses a vial and checks to make sure all the skin has grown back over his hand. He's not going to be using that hand again until he gets back to the dream, but at least it's stopped leaking.

It looks like the room he's in is relatively safe. The stairs are collapsed, and the windows are bricked up.

"—isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't—"

And now to deal with the person in the corner. He's dressed in the standard Yharnam hunter set, but his weapons are both cast into a pile in the opposite corner of the unlit living room, and he's huddled between a bookshelf and a wall, scratching his own hands bloody with a blank look in his eyes. He couldn't look more harmless if he was trying. Shouichi doesn't want to get close.

"Hey." He snaps his fingers. "I'm going to kill you."

After a second's delay the hunter's hands stop moving. He meets Shouichi's eyes. Without warning, he lurches to his feet, reaching a hand out. He doesn't make to get closer to Shouichi, but Shouichi's willing to bet that it's not because of the threat of the gun aimed between his eyes. Shouichi doesn't think he notices it. "Are you real?"

This is interesting. "I'm real," he answers. He'll get more information if he plays along. And the man's desperate. Shouichi isn't heartless. "Are you?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes."

"Why did you think I was not?"

"I don't know," he says. He hasn't looked away from Shouichi's eyes. Shouichi doesn't remember if he's seen the guy blink. "Some of them aren't."

"Them?"

"But you're not them. You're real."

"I am."

"Is this place real?"

"Yes," Shouichi tries.

The man backsteps as if Shouichi attacked him until he hits the wall, and then he covers his eyes with his hands. He moans. "You're them," he hisses. "You're _them_."

 _Good job, Shouichi._ "Fine," he says to buy himself time. "You're... saying this place isn't real." No response. The man just shakes while scrabbling weakly at his face. Shouichi, who's not a stranger to babbling lunacy, takes a step back of his own in case something sprouts out of the man's skull. But the man only keeps scratching, harmless as the wall behind him. "I know a method you can use to prove it."

The man stops moving and peers out from between his fingers. "How?"

Shouichi twirls the pistol to catch his attention. "I shoot you. If you die, this is real. If you wake up, it's not." It's not the best solution. If the man fears death more than the possibility of living in a false reality, it won't work at all. It's all Shouichi has to offer, though. Iosefka could make something of him, but Shouichi's not sure he can survive the journey to the clinic even while he's not escorting a dead weight.

But there's barely a pause between him closing his mouth and the man saying, "Yes. Do it." Shouichi raises an eyebrow and obliges.

Not a lot of blood echoes from that one. Good thing that's not what he did it for.

He leaves through the chimney. He puts his head over the rim to check that the coast is clear, then climbs out and starts for Oedon Chapel again, more careful this time about his path. He makes it without incident to the plaza near the chapel but has to stop on a roof overlooking it. If the streets are bad, he doesn't know what to call the plaza.

He can't actually see much through the smoke from the fire and explosions, but the sounds tell him all he needs to know, and the glimpses he manages to catch through the dust aren't promising. He's not getting through that.

There's a way around the plaza, but it's a long detour, and it involves crossing the stairs that lead up to the Grand Cathedral. If he's going to use it, he's better off just going to the Grand Cathedral instead.

He edges around the plaza. He makes it all the way to the stairs without getting spotted, but his luck runs out as soon as he drops to street level by the base of the stairway. Someone shoots at him, a scattershot weapon by the sound, and he ducks behind the railing just long enough to hear stone crack under the assault before he sprints up the stairs.

The other hunter catches up to him quickly. While he still has the higher ground, he turns around and fires. The other hunter dodges two bullets, hardly slowing, and he's already on Shouichi by the time the third clips his leg. Shouichi sidesteps the axe swing, half his attention occupied by not tripping on the wrong stair.

The axe head turns into a ball of flame as soon as it hits the rock, and a blast of heat rustles both hunters' armor. The other hunter pushes the axe's handle in, not noticing or not caring about the flames that singe his glove, and swings again. Shouichi barely dodges, fires his gun at the same time as the other hunter does. He misses; the other hunter doesn't, but his bullets only sting, stopped by Shouichi's armor. He follows it up immediately with his axe.

Shouichi tries to backpedal, but the hunter doesn't relent. He dodges another swing, but the second hits him hard, caving in his ribs and throwing him into the railing. He spends a vial as he steadies himself, washing out the pain, and backs up the stairs out of range of the next swing, and then the other hunter stumbles, the numbness from the first bullet that hit him in the leg finally taking effect.

Shouchi doesn't waste the opportunity. He shoots him again, taking him full in the torso this time, and then furious barking comes from up the stairway, getting louder as it drawls closer. Shouichi curses, half-turns to keep the hunter in his line of sight, and sees the four dogs racing towards him. Towards them—the hounds aren't focused completely on Shouichi.

He shoots one, throwing it back, dodges out of the way of the second and third to let them lope past for the other hunter, and then the fourth suddenly yelps and trips, a long stick—a spear?—extending out of its ribs.

The dog Shouichi shot is clambering to its feet when another—arrow, that's definitely an arrow—nails its head to the ground. Shouichi follows the line of the shot to a hunter wielding a bow at the stop of the stairs. It's not pointed at Shouichi. Unlike every other hunter Shouichi's seen so far in this nightmare, he's not drenched head to toe in blood, just streaks and splatters of it around his shoes and the bottoms of his ragged pants. He curls a hand, beckoning, then nocks his bow, aiming for the two dogs tearing at the other hunter below.

Shouichi runs for him, bounding over corpses of dogs and men. The other hunter slings his bow over his back when Shouichi draws near. "The cathedral," he says.

Shouichi makes it up the rest of the stairs, steps around the massive body of something with tentacles for a face at the doors to the cathedral, and then he's inside. The quiet is nearly stifling. The other hunter comes in after him. "Let's not linger in the doorway," he says, and Shouichi follows him up between the statues of praying abominations.

At the top of the stairs, Shouichi stops. There's a giant... thing at the other end of the cavernous room. A beast with the twisted antlers and jutting ribs of a cleric beast, but embers smoldering in its fur and curling through the air around it. It's not awake. Its eyes are closed, and it's seated motionless on a massive altar with its oversized left arm hanging down to the floor. There's no lamp on the floor where there should be, which always means there's an enemy nearby that the messengers want nothing to do with.

"You won't wake him," the other hunter says. His voice is soft—not quiet, just soft. Shouichi can easily imagine it merging seamlessly into any crowd. "Do you speak?"

"Yes. Thank you for what you did back there." The man nods an acknowledgement, and Shouichi asks, "What is that?"

"Can't you tell? He's a cleric beast."

"Is he the reason there's nothing else in here?"

"Most likely," the hunter says. "But don't concern yourself. As I said, you won't wake him. You're from Yharnam, aren't you?"

It takes a moment for Shouichi to parse that. He's never been confused for a native before. "Japan."

The hunter smiles, just a quirk of his lips. His bandages only covers his eyes, leaving his face below the bridge of his nose visible. "I meant that you've just arrived in this nightmare from Yharnam."

"I thought—" Shouichi begins, and then breaks off, frowning at the unconscious cleric beast. No. The hunter's dream isn't the same place as the abandoned workshop it's modeled after, either.

"This is not Yharnam," the hunter confirms. "Welcome to the hunter's nightmare. A fitting afterlife for those who hunted, isn't it?"

"Afterlife?" Shouichi repeats, alarmed.

The hunter shrugs. "Of a sort. You can leave as you like, no worries. The dream keeps you tethered. You might want to dispose of that eyeball you're carrying, however, if you've no intention of returning prematurely."

Shouichi brings out the eyeball in question. The pupil is blotted, the whites bloodshot, and it's a little squished from sitting in his pocket from the time he cut it out of its original owner.

Shouichi is not a serial killer. He doesn't only go after specific targets—he's actually different from other hunters in that respect, since they only kill beasts and madmen. But he does take trophies. Occasionally, and only one at a time, and he doesn't kill _for_ the trophies. It's just... reassuring to have concrete, physical evidence of the things he's done, since the bodies never last for long.

"I'm here because of this?" he asks.

"Not only because of that," the hunter says, "but yes. That's the primary reason. You've never wondered why so many hunters choose to blind themselves? Eyes are precious. Like most precious commodities, they're dangerous as well. It's best not to have too many unless you know for certain you can manage it."

Shouichi pockets the eye again and says carefully, "You're unusually willing to talk. Most of the people I've met in Yharnam keep mum about the hunt."

"I'm aware. That's why so many of you have ended up here, because you don't know what knowledge to avoid." His lips thin. "Though I'm sure the numbers would be better, too, if you didn't think this was a fantasy."

Shouichi gapes.

Casually, just in case Shouichi didn't get it, the hunter adds, "Some of those you met outside are your countrymen. A good portion of those in the newer styles of armor. The ones who arrived in better condition told me of what's happening in Yharnam."

"I killed one," Shouichi says.

"Those who die here don't return. With some exceptions, but I sincerely doubt that hunter was one of them."

Shouichi _stares_ at him. Then, slowly, starting from just a huff of breath, he begins to laugh. It's not long before he's doubled over, an arm on the wall for support as he gasps for air. The other hunter waits him out, turned all the while to the cleric beast across the room.

"Fucking _Kayaba_ ," Shouichi wheezes, the floor swimming in his vision. What is the game developer trying to _do_?

"I'm surprised," the hunter says mildly. "You believe me."

"Obviously I do," Shouichi murmurs. "I'm not in denial." And he's spent more time in Yahar'gul than any other player he knows of. It's a place that's too awful to be fictional. There are things real people do that are too horrible for artists to portray without getting called out on for being unrealistic or attention-seeking, and the deep, hidden corners of Yahar'gul are made only of those things. "You're angry at us."

The response, when it comes, is quiet. "I shouldn't be."

Shouichi jerks his head towards the stairway leading out. "What was it like before we came here?"

The hunter doesn't reply.

"Quieter," Shouichi answers for him. "Kayaba fucked you over too, doing whatever he did to get us here. What is Yharnam? A different world?" It sounds absurd when he says it out loud, but he'll believe close to anything at this point.

"Of a sort."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Don't you want to be going?" the hunter says, not even trying to make the subject change subtle.

"Are there any lanterns in this nightmare?"

The hunter crosses his arms, still not facing Shouichi. "You want a way to return here."

"I don't like not being able to go somewhere." He gets enough of that in real— back home.

"That's a terrible reason," the hunter says. "No. There are no lanterns."

Shouichi bares his teeth under his helmet, irked at being lied to this obviously—but the man helped him, putting himself at risk to do so. And Shouichi's crippled. He does his best to move past the emotion. His next question still comes out laced with hints of a growl, though. "Why are you in this place? You're not the same as the hunters outside."

"Am I not? We're all hunters, aren't we?" he says. Which is not an actual answer. Shouichi's about to press him, but then a sound interrupts him. Footsteps, echoing up from the bottom of the stairs.

"You said that beast keeps everything else out," Shouichi says.

"I must have been wrong. It happens. No need to sound so surprised." He doesn't sound happy about it either, though.

They back away from the entrance as the footsteps get louder. Shouichi thinks its owner is human. Human-shaped. The other hunter stops in the middle of the room, bow nocked and aimed. Shouichi stays near the side by the wall, unwilling to put his back to the beast no matter what the other hunter says.

It's the hunter with the axe. He stops at the top of the stairs. For a while, the only sound is the blood on his armor dripping into the puddle growing around his feet and forming a river down the stairs. Then he raises his head, scenting the air—though how he can smell anything past all that blood is beyond Shouichi—and his feet turn just barely in Shouichi's direction. He makes no move to get closer, though. Shouichi doesn't know how, but he gets the impression that the short hunter is confused.

Then, slowly, his feet shift again, and he cocks his head at the hunter with the bow instead. He starts forwards, axe scraping sparks on the floor.

Shouichi's about to shoot him, but the hunter with the bow says, "Wait a moment." Shouichi doesn't know who he's talking to, but he holds back anyway, curious to see where he's going with this. The other hunter doesn't stop.

The hunter with the bow turns, takes a few steps back towards the wall Shouichi's against, and the other hunter slows briefly but doesn't adjust his course. He's heading, Shouichi realizes, for the sleeping beast.

The hunter lowers his bow. "Nothing has been so mad as to attack him before."

"Will that wake him?"

"I don't know that I want to find out. Not from here."

He starts towards the exit at a brisk walk, and Shouichi falls into step next to him, chancing a quick look back at the hunter drawing near to the beast. "He's only a cleric beast," he says, tracing the shape of the antlers. "One that's on fire."

"If you like."

A wave of heat hits Shouichi in the back. He nearly falls—it's only temperature, but it happens so suddenly it impacts him like a physical force. The other hunter catches him, keeps hold of him just long enough for him to regain his footing fully, and then lets go and starts running. Embers dance in the air. Shouichi's eyes sting at the dryness. Another second in this room and he'll be sweating, but goosebumps prickle along his arms, up his back and the back of his neck.

He sprints after the other hunter as behind them, on the altar, something wakes up and _screams_.


End file.
